શ્રી સવા બારણે લખ્યા કર તું
શબ્દથી બીજુ શું સવાયું છે
સત્યને કોણ ધારે એ જોયા કર
એ કાં સુદર્શન છે, ને કાં અડાયું છે
- મનોજ ખંડેરિયા
To read the whole Gazal, click on title.
Wednesday, February 03, 2010
Monday, January 25, 2010
Our Boredom, Ourselves
If you read a lot of book reviews, there are certain words that tend to crop up with comforting, or maybe it’s dismaying, regularity. Lyrical. Compelling. Moving. Intriguing. Absorbing. Frustrating. Uneven. Disappointing. But there is one word you seldom encounter: boring. It occurred a mere 19 times in the Book Review in 2009, and rarely as a direct description of the book under review.
This isn’t because books sent out to reviewers never turn out to be boring. (Trust me on this one.) Rather, boredom — unlike its equally bland smiley-faced twin, interest — is something professional readers, who are expected to keep things lively, would rather not admit to, for fear of being scolded and sent back to the Weekly Reader. As a general state of mind, boredom is morally suspect, threatening to shine its dull light back on the person who invokes it. “The only horrible thing in the world is ennui,” Oscar Wilde once wrote, suggesting that boredom doesn’t feel much better in French. “That is the one sin for which there is no forgiveness.”
And yet boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book, especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.
Boredom, like the modern novel, was born in the 18th century, and came into full flower in the 19th. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded use of “to bore” dates to a 1768 letter by the Earl of Carlisle, mentioning his “Newmarket friends, who are to be bored by these Frenchmen.” “Bores,” meaning boring things, arrived soon after, followed by human bores. By the time of the O.E.D.’s first citation of the noun “boredom” in 1852, in Dickens’s “Bleak House” (where it occurs six times by my count), everyone, or at least everyone in the novel-reading middle classes, seemed to be bored, or worried about becoming bored.
Boredom, scholars argue, was something new, different from the dullness, lassitude and tedium people had no doubt been experiencing for centuries. In her ingenious study “Boredom: The Literary History of a State of Mind” (1995), Patricia Meyer Spacks describes it as a luxury — and a peril — born of the Industrial Revolution, reflecting the rise of individualism, leisure (especially female leisure) and the idea of happiness as a right and a daunting personal responsibility. “Boredom presents itself as a trivial emotion that can trivialize the world,” Spacks writes. “It implies an embracing sense of irritation and unease. It reflects a state of affairs in which the individual is assigned ever more importance and ever less power.”
In Saul Bellow’s “Humboldt’s Gift,” the narrator — a writer who spends the “final Eisenhower years” trying to write the definitive treatise on boredom — describes it as “a kind of pain caused by unused powers, the pain of wasted possibilities or talents, . . . accompanied by expectations of the optimum utilization of capacities.” But boredom may itself be a highly useful human capacity, at least according to some psychologists and neuroscientists, who have begun examining it not just as an accomplice to depression and addiction but as an important source of creativity, well-being and our very sense of self.
Researchers have discovered that when people are conscious but doing nothing — for example, lying in an f.M.R.I. scanner, waiting to be given some simple mental task as part of a psychology experiment — the brain is in fact firing away, with greater activity in regions responsible for recalling autobiographical memory, imagining the thoughts and feelings of others, and conjuring hypothetical events: the literary areas of the brain, you might say. When this so-called default mode network is activated, the brain uses only about 5 percent less energy than it does when engaged in basic tasks. But that discrepancy may explain why time seems to pass more slowly at such moments. It may also explain the agitated restlessness that compels the bored to seek relief in doodling or daydreaming.
It’s common to decry our collective thaasophobia, or fear of boredom, manifested in our addiction to iPhone apps, the cable news crawl and ever mutating varieties of multitasking. One cellphone company has even promoted the idea of “microboredom,” which refers to those moments of inactivity that occur when we’re, say, stuck waiting in line for a latte without our BlackBerry. But novelists, for all their own fears of being dismissed as boring, continue to offer some bold resistance to the broader culture’s zero-tolerance boredom eradication program.
In April 2011, the limits of literary boredom will be tested when Little, Brown & Company publishes “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s novel, found unfinished after his suicide in 2008, about the inner lives of number-crunching I.R.S. agents. An excerpt that appeared last year in The New Yorker depicts a universe of microboredom gone macro: “He did another return; again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and ID number. . . .”
In April 2011, the limits of literary boredom will be tested when Little, Brown & Company publishes “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s novel, found unfinished after his suicide in 2008, about the inner lives of number-crunching I.R.S. agents. An excerpt that appeared last year in The New Yorker depicts a universe of microboredom gone macro: “He did another return; again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and ID number. . . .”
For all the mundanity of its subject matter, the excerpt presents boredom as something more strenuous and exalted than the friendly helper depicted by the neuroscientists, keeping our minds revved up even when we think we’re idling. Boredom isn’t just good for your brain. It’s good for your soul. “Bliss — a second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom,” Wallace wrote in a note left with the manuscript. “Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”
It remains to be seen whether “The Pale King” will break through to the ecstasy beyond boredom, or just put readers to sleep. (Or perhaps cause serial brain injury, like the unreadably dense experimental novel that keeps laying waste to readers in “The Information,” by Martin Amis.) But if Wallace’s last work turns out to be unbearably dull, perhaps we should be grateful. After all, if it weren’t for all the boring books in the world, why would anyone feel the need to try to write more interesting ones?
-Jennifer Schuessler for the New York Times Book Review.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Making Art Out of an Encounter
I first encountered Tino Sehgal’s work under ideal conditions: total ignorance. Happening to be in Berlin in 2006 at the time of the city’s art biennial, I heard from an art-dealer friend that there was one exhibition not to miss. “I won’t tell you anything more,” he said, as he walked me to the site and bid me farewell. I trod up a creaking staircase in a building from the turn of the last century and entered a decayed ballroom, its ornate moldings and gilt mirrors testifying to a more glorious past. Lying on the floor, a man and a woman, fully dressed, were embracing languidly. There was no one else in the room. My presence went unacknowledged. In a state of mounting confusion and embarrassment, I stayed until I could stand it no longer, and then I retreated down the staircase. Out on the street, I sighed with relief, because I once again knew where I was.
Had I remained longer, I might have recognized that the two were re-enacting the curved-arm caressing gesture of Rodin’s marble statue “The Kiss,” as well as poses from other osculatory works, some less widely known but in their own way iconic, like Jeff Koons’s ceramic sculpture series “Made in Heaven.” And eventually I would have heard one member of the intertwined couple speak these words: “Tino Sehgal. ‘Kiss.’ 2002.” But I didn’t need that information for the piece to linger in my memory and arouse my curiosity.
I knew the name of the artist, and I watched for him. Although Sehgal was very busy, thriving in the incubation culture of art fairs and international exhibitions, he did not surface in New York until his inaugural show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in November 2007. This time when I walked into the exhibition space, I had more of an idea of what to expect, but once again I was knocked off-balance. “Welcome to this situation,” a group of six people said in unison to greet me, ending with the auditory flourish of a sharp intake of breath; then they slowly backed off, all the while facing me, and froze into unnatural positions. At which point one of the group recited a quotation: “In 1958, somebody said, ‘The income that men derive producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence.’ ” Jumping off from that statement, the conversationalists — Sehgal refers to them as “interpreters” — began a lively back and forth. Occasionally one of the six might turn to a gallery visitor and utter a compliment or say, “Or what do you think?” and then incorporate that person’s comment into the exchange of words. Mostly they seemed content to natter at high velocity among themselves. It all continued until the moment when a new visitor arrived, an event that acted as a sort of rewind button. “Welcome to this situation,” they chanted again, breathing in and backing off as they had done before and then assuming another stylized stance. A new quotation was dropped and another discussion commenced. Just as in Berlin, I felt a battleground developing in my mind, between a fascinated desire to stay and a disquieted urge to flee.
If you are not a devotee of the cult of contemporary art, especially its Conceptualist cadre, you may feel a whirring sensation beneath your eyelids starting up right about now. Your skepticism isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a matter of “Is this art?” Almost a century has elapsed since Marcel Duchamp aced that one by attaching titles to everyday objects (a urinal, a bicycle wheel) and demonstrating that anything can be art if the artist says it is. Nevertheless, the ineffaceable critical question remains: “Is it good art?” Later this month, when Sehgal’s one-man show takes over the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda for a six-week run, thousands of noninitiates, many no doubt having come to see the Frank Lloyd Wright building without any advance notification of what art exhibitions are on, will be able to decide for themselves.
If the overall response to “This Situation” at the Marian Goodman Gallery is any guide, even some who expect to hate Sehgal’s work will leave enthralled. “I often see shows I don’t like, but this was the only show I’ve ever seen that didn’t like me,” wrote New York magazine’s art critic, Jerry Saltz, judging “This Situation” to be the best exhibition he encountered in 2008. Unlike so much of contemporary art, Sehgal’s art evokes passionate reactions among the unschooled as well as the cognoscenti. Anyone who has seen the onlookers trudging passively through an art museum (all too often the Guggenheim ramp resembles the humane cattle slaughterhouses designed by Temple Grandin) can appreciate the achievement. What fascinates me about Sehgal is that working only with human clay, he can call forth thoughtful and visceral responses from people who remain unmoved by more conventional paintings and sculptures. When I expressed this to him, he laughed at me. “I’m more ambitious than that,” he said. “That’s too little of a game.”
At any time of day, Sehgal, who is 33, looks as if he has just tumbled out of bed. His tousled hair is innocent of exposure to a brush. His overcoat long ago parted company with its lining. In the six months since we first met, I have usually seen him in the same black jeans, black one-button pullover and white sneakers. My initial impression was that this was a man who was completely careless about his appearance, but I eventually concluded that the scrupulous inattention to wardrobe and grooming was of a piece with his refusal to fly on airplanes (visiting America from his home in Berlin, he travels by ship) or to carry a cellphone. More to the point, this conspicuous avoidance of unnecessary consumption conforms to the credo that underlies his work. Sehgal makes art that does not require the transformation of any materials. He refuses to add objects to a society that he says is overly encumbered with them.
It’s his rigorous devotion to an art that vanishes instantly that Sehgal and his curators emphasize. “There’s a purity to his approach,” says Catherine Wood, the curator of contemporary art and performance at the Tate Modern in London. “There are a few artists who are making live action that is based in sculpture, but what sets him apart is his purist insistence on the immateriality — or ephemeral materiality — of the work, so it crystallizes and disperses again, so there is no trace left at all.” Fifty years ago, Yves Klein sold empty spaces in Paris in return for gold; the buyers received a certificate of ownership. In the conceptual art that flowered in the late 1960s and early ’70s, artists like Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas and Lynda Benglis performed before a camera; the videotape documented that action and became a commodity that could be sold by an art dealer. Around the same time, Michael Asher and Daniel Buren were staging interventions in art museums, removing panels from the building facade or paintings from the wall and calling attention to the change; if you are interested, you can check out the installation photographs. Then and now, the gallery that represents Ian Wilson will sell you the right to have a discussion with the artist; once it has occurred, the conversation is commemorated with a certificate that belongs to you. In their flight from the object-based art market, these Conceptualist and post-Minimalist artists left behind them, like bread crumbs, objects that provided a path back in.
In contrast, Sehgal is an absolutist. He does not allow his pieces to be photographed. They are not explained by wall labels or accompanied by catalogs. No press releases herald the openings of his exhibitions; indeed, there are no official openings, just unceremonious start dates. All of this can engender skepticism, but the aspect of Sehgal’s work that his detractors find most irritating is the way the art is sold. First of all, there is the fact that it is sold, just as if it were made of, say, cast bronze: in editions of four to six (with Sehgal retaining an additional “artist’s proof”) at prices between $85,000 and $145,000 apiece. Unlike some of his Conceptualist predecessors, Sehgal is totally unapologetic about the fact that his work is commercially traded. “The market is something you can’t be outside of and you can’t want to be outside of, if you are doing anything specialized,” he told an audience last May at the Museum of Modern Art, which bought “Kiss” in 2008 in a transaction that the museum’s director, Glenn Lowry, deemed “one of the most elaborate and difficult acquisitions we have ever made.”
As far as money goes, at a museum-discount price of $70,000 it was a minor MoMA purchase; but Lowry was not overstating the cost of time and energy. Since there can be no written contract, the sale of a Sehgal piece must be conducted orally, with a lawyer or a notary public on hand to witness it. The work is described; the right to install it for an unspecified number of times under the supervision of Sehgal or one of his representatives is stipulated; and the price is stated. The buyer agrees to certain restrictions, perhaps the most important being the ban on future documentation, which extends to any subsequent transfers of ownership. “If the work gets resold, it has to be done in the same way it was acquired originally,” says Jan Mot, who is Sehgal’s dealer in Brussels. “If it is not done according to the conditions of the first sale, one could debate whether it was an authentic sale. It’s like making a false Tino Sehgal, if you start making documentation and a certificate.”
The act of going to a logical extreme can have illuminating results. Yasmil Raymond, who worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for five years before becoming a curator at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, says that the Walker’s acquisition of a Sehgal work, “This Objective of That Object,” was the most contentious in her time there. In the piece, five interpreters surround a visitor, turn their backs to her and declaim, “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion.” If the visitor says nothing, the interpreters will eventually crumple to the floor; but a response will reanimate them, and one of them will cry, “A comment, a comment, we have a comment!” And at that, with the visitor’s comment as a starting point, a conversation begins. What is curious is that the purchase of the work generated its own passionate discussion. “At the Walker, they have six board meetings a year, and this was the most difficult one I ever was at,” Raymond says. “It was the only time someone on the acquisitions committee voted against an acquisition. There was a small insurrection. Three people abstained, and one voted against it. It was a polemical reaction. Then all the other board members had to defend and insist on why they were voting for this. They were really articulate on why the Walker had to acquire the work, about supporting unsafe ideas, on the risk of creativity and artistic practice.” It was exactly the kind of conversation Sehgal hopes to provoke.
Over the course of a career barely a decade long, Sehgal has produced two kinds of art. The earliest works, like “Kiss,” are silent and sculptural: a viewer encounters a piece in a museum or gallery just as if it were a marble statue. Sehgal is adamant that he is producing a work of art, not theater: unlike a performance, a Sehgal is on display for the entire time the institution is open, and the human actors are identified no more precisely than as if they were bronze or marble. (They are, however, paid.) But because the piece is formed of people, not of metal or stone, the viewer is aware that, regardless of how absorbed the models seem to be in their activity, at any moment they have the capability of turning their gaze on him — as, indeed, they periodically do in “Kiss.” That potential for interaction is explored extensively in Sehgal’s second line of work, the “constructed situations” (like “This Situation”), in which the visitor is drawn in and becomes a participant.
Residing in the ether of spoken instructions and ephemeral enactment, these pieces can misleadingly appear to be slapdash or freely improvisatory. In fact, Sehgal supervises his work with painstaking care, in the unremitting state of anxiety of a control freak who has opted to work in an uncontrollable milieu. “These pieces are very delicate,” Raymond observes. “The human being is such an explosive material. You have to treat it delicately and sometimes put pressure on it. We’re dealing with the most fragile of all material — the human mind.”
In the Guggenheim show, “Kiss” will be on view on the ground floor, but the main work is a constructed situation that dates from 2006 and has been installed twice in Europe. At Sehgal’s insistence, and for the sake of allowing a visitor to experience the piece with something like the Edenic innocence in which I fell upon “Kiss,” I won’t divulge what happens other than to say that on the spiral ramp of the rotunda, each individual or group will be engaged in conversation by several different interpreters of very different ages. To install the work, Sehgal must enlist the interpreters, train them and, finally, cajole them into showing up regularly and keeping up their enthusiasm.
First comes the recruitment. For older candidates, many of whom are college instructors, Sehgal relied on recommendations and then held lengthy personal interviews during the past year. The younger ones he and his team had to find in casting calls. If you regard Sehgal as a 21st-century sculptor who abjures digging stone out of a ravaged earth, then the interviews that he conducted of grade-school children and teenage college students throughout the city were the ecologically informed equivalent of the scouting missions that Michelangelo made to the marble quarries of Carrara. The small children he sought were between ages 8 and 12, while the teenagers were typically college freshmen. Like the older interpreters, the teenagers would be required to converse in an interesting and intelligent way, but the children had to be able chiefly to encapsulate what they were told in a summary form. They also needed to be outgoing enough to chat readily with strangers. In November, I watched Sehgal, accompanied by a Guggenheim assistant curator and professionals from a New York-based casting agency, interview groups of little kids and teenagers, usually eight at a time.
One sample of children came mostly from St. Ann’s School, a private school in Brooklyn. “I’m just going to ask what your name is and how old you are and what you like doing, and then after we’re going to play a little game,” Sehgal announced, as he would say in pretty much precisely those words at every audition of children. An 8-year-old boy with a piping voice and charming self-possession said, “The last thing I’ve done is create a litmus solution.” An 8-year-old girl favored musical comedy. The others had equally enriching extracurricular activities to report.
Then it was time for the game, which Sehgal explained would begin simply and become more difficult. The game consisted of listening to the answer to a question and then repeating what was said. Taking suggestions for a question from the children, he chose, “What is a stool?”
A young woman from the casting agency said: “A stool is a piece of furniture that has four legs and usually is taller than a chair. You can sit on a stool, and sometimes you can climb on a stool to get something.”
The children raised their hands to offer their recaps. Like the blind men around the elephant, they would get different parts of it. Sehgal listened. From those who did not volunteer, he tried to coax a response.
The game escalated to “What is a computer?” and then “What is a democracy?”
“A democracy is a system of government where the citizens of the country elect their leader,” said another casting agent. “The United States is a democracy. The hope is that in electing a leader, the voice of the people will be heard through that representative. The opposite of a democracy is a dictatorship, where one person has all the say and all the power.”
Now we were in deeper waters. Most of the children had trouble pronouncing the word “democracy,” and their capacity to recall and regurgitate the disjointed bits of information varied appreciably. With the final question — “What is an abstraction?” — things became more challenging still. Forget about pronunciation or any comprehension of the term. What they came back with was a mixture of things they remembered and things they made up. Those whose recollections outdistanced their imaginations were the preferred ones, so long as they were not incapacitated by shyness.
Afterward Sehgal reviewed the young contestants with his associates, each of whom had written down ratings. He compared the students with ones they had recently seen at the Thurgood Marshall Academy in Harlem, where he found a higher proportion of promising candidates adept at reciting back what they heard.
“The thing about these St. Ann’s kids is they’re socially very able,” he told me. “The Thurgood Marshall kids are put in the world to receive — they are there to pay attention. It’s not that the St. Ann’s kids are not intelligent. They are. They are already in the mind-set of ‘What can I bring into the world out of myself?’ ”
For the Guggenheim exhibition, such qualities would be more appropriate in the teenage interpreters. The artist’s quarrying continued.
As a youth, Sehgal was attracted to the study of dance (how people move) and political economy (how society works). His father, now retired, was an I.B.M. manager from India, his mother a German native and homemaker. Sehgal was born in London and raised primarily in Dusseldorf, Paris and a town close to Stuttgart; he has a younger sister, who grew up to become a philosopher specializing in Alfred North Whitehead. Their father talked with them in English, their mother in German. Sehgal speaks fluent English with a faint German inflection.
When he was an adolescent, Sehgal says, a direct encounter with the political process disenchanted him permanently from parliamentary politics. Friends asked him to speak at a hearing in favor of a transportation initiative in Stuttgart. “I remember seeing the minister of transportation dive and dodge,” he says. “All he could do was administer what the public opinion was, or else he would be voted out in the next election.” If electoral politics could not produce fundamental change, why bother with it? “It’s much more interesting to change the values,” he says. “I was never interested again in parliamentary politics. I became interested in culture.”
This political awakening strengthened his attraction to dance. Aside from its physical appeal, dance, in his eyes, had the virtue of creating something that disappeared at the moment it was produced. “My work comes out of my experiment with myself,” he says. “As a person in the first world, you’re quite heavy as a person in what you use up. Can I actually solve this for myself? Can I have something to do, keep myself interested and not be somebody who is situated outside society, and can I do this without transforming lots of material?” He moved at age 18 to Berlin, where he studied political economy and dance. After a few years he relocated to Essen, again taking classes in both subjects.
Through friends in Berlin, he became friendly with the experimental choreographer Xavier Le Roy and later with another avant-garde dance artist, Jérôme Bel, who were challenging the preconceptions that audiences brought to dance performances. In 1999, he took a job in Ghent, Belgium, at Les Ballets C. de la B. dance collective. At the same time, he was developing his own work. His first noteworthy piece was called “Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century,” in which he performed by himself, naked, on a stage decorated with only a work light, calling up signature movements in 20 styles: Nijinsky, Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, down to Xavier Le Roy. (Notwithstanding its title, the piece was approximately 55 minutes long.)
He presented “Twenty Minutes” in a festival at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where one appreciative spectator was a curator of about the same age, Jens Hoffmann. “Afterward I told him it was like a museum of dance,” Hoffmann recalls. “He said, ‘This is exactly what I was trying to do.’ ” Sehgal was more of a conceptual artist than a choreographer. “I always felt closer to Marcel Broodthaers than I did to Martha Graham,” he says. He loves the intellectual discourse that surrounds contemporary art; it’s absent from dance criticism. (He carries these preferences into his private life. His partner, Dorothea von Hantelmann, is an art historian who has written extensively about “performativity” in visual art; they have a 2-year-old son, Nalin.) Hoffmann encouraged him to present his work in art venues, not dance theaters.
As a curator of the Manifesta biennial art exhibition in Frankfurt in 2003, Hoffmann brought “Instead of Allowing Some Thing to Rise Up to Your Face Dancing Bruce and Dan and Other Things” (2000), a piece that Sehgal had devised specifically for a contemporary art museum, the S.M.A.K. in Ghent. As its unwieldy title indicates to those in the know, it is a gloss on pieces of conceptual art of the early ’70s by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham. In those earlier works, the artist or a friend of the artist performs a series of stipulated movements, which are captured on a videotape for display in a gallery or museum. Sehgal selected 16 gestural moments from those videos and asked a performer to stitch them together with slowed-down, unaccented motions. He got the S.M.A.K. to agree to show the work nonstop during museum hours for a week; as one performer’s shift was ending, a successor would appear and writhe alongside him for about half a minute, and then the first one would depart. In a blatant way, human beings were filling the role that sculptures occupy in a museum.
“When I saw the visitors’ reaction, I was clear that this was it,” Sehgal says. “Their reactions were so much stronger than I expected. They couldn’t believe it was a person. They thought it had to be a robot or a puppet. There was such an expectation that in a museum something must be an object.”
Once he decided to transform choreographic material into sculpture, Sehgal needed to find a way to keep a piece going continuously. The silent interpreters in the early works perform in a loop, and the only visible connecting hinge occurs at a shift change, when one actor relieves another. That was relatively simple.
With “This Is Good” (2001), the first of his constructed situations, each new arrival of a visitor triggers an activity of limited duration; it is as if the piece were a kinetic sculpture powered by a push button. When someone enters the gallery, a guard begins windmilling his arms and hopping from one leg to the other and then says: “Tino Sehgal. ‘This Is Good.’ 2001.” Calling attention to the usually unnoticed employees in a museum, the piece plays off Sehgal’s mission to make people, not objects, the material of his work. But the payoff is limited. Things got more interesting with “This Is Exchange” (2003), in which the visitor is enlisted as a co-producer of the piece. At the entrance to the museum, a ticket taker asks the visitor to engage in a conversation about the market economy; after five minutes, if a ticket buyer who agreed to the request is still gamely playing along, she receives a partial refund of the admission fee. For many visitors, especially those who argued that they detested the market economy, it came as an unsettling surprise to receive this reminder that whatever their opinion of it, they were nonetheless immersed in it. Which, of course, was one of Sehgal’s aims.
Although Sehgal sells pieces to private collectors, his work seems to function best in a museum or a gallery, where its subtraction of a material object is made visible by the institutional surroundings that give shape to his void. “My work definitely needs this framing as art, and the stronger this framing is,” he says, “the more works of mine are possible.” Because the activity in his work is so close to the routines of everyday life, he has found ways to emphasize its artificiality. One signature device is the removal of all emphases in movement; his interpreters proceed in a slow trancelike state. “The most important thing is you don’t see an accent,” he said at a “Kiss” rehearsal I attended. “In everyday life, basically, in whatever we do there is an accent. Here, there is a continuous flow.”
Eliminating the object has opened a seemingly limitless number of possibilities for Sehgal. At the C.C.A. Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, Jens Hoffmann, who became the director in 2006, has been presenting an ongoing series of Sehgal pieces. Usually visitors to this small contemporary art museum realize fairly soon that they are in the presence of a Sehgal work. But not always. In one piece, a visitor would arrive to find the museum apparently empty of all people. “Once when a person thought there were no guards around, he started stealing catalogs,” Hoffmann recalls. “The guard came up and said: ‘Would you please put the books back? This is a piece by Tino Sehgal.’ ”
Is it possible to be both playful and profound? Sehgal is wagering yes. The moral earnestness that underlies his work would be ponderous if unleavened by humor; the games would be just child’s sport if they did not illuminate serious matters. The mixture can confuse people. At a meeting that Sehgal, on one of his human-quarrying forays, held last May with the administrators of a Harlem after-school program, he was pressed to explain what he aimed to accomplish in the Guggenheim piece. “The real deal is what happens there,” he said. “The real deal is the conversation.” For an educator who was trying to wean children from the cycle of poverty, this was palpably an unsatisfactory answer. He asked Sehgal again what was his goal. “It’s a structure to have a conversation about people’s values,” Sehgal said.
A little later in the discussion, the man returned to his theme. “So I guess you’re saying your ambition is to change perception,” he said. “Is that correct?” And this time, Sehgal took the bait.
“That’s a very simple way of saying what I’m doing,” he said. “For the last two or three hundred years in human society, we have been very focused on the earth. We have been transforming the materials of the earth, and the museum has developed also over the last two or three hundred years as a temple of objects made from the earth. I’m the guy who comes in and says: ‘I’m bored with that. I don’t think it’s that interesting, and it’s not sustainable.’ Inside this temple of objects, I refocus attention to human relations.”
This time the man nodded in understanding, with an expression I recognized. He was seeing things from another perspective, as he participated in a conversation within a framework constructed by Tino Sehgal.
-ARTHUR LUBOW for The New York Times Magazine
Though the Magazine article was accompanied by some photographs, I choose not to post those images in order to truly adhere to Sehgal's philosophy behind his art. Those interested in seeing omitted images, click on the post title.
Had I remained longer, I might have recognized that the two were re-enacting the curved-arm caressing gesture of Rodin’s marble statue “The Kiss,” as well as poses from other osculatory works, some less widely known but in their own way iconic, like Jeff Koons’s ceramic sculpture series “Made in Heaven.” And eventually I would have heard one member of the intertwined couple speak these words: “Tino Sehgal. ‘Kiss.’ 2002.” But I didn’t need that information for the piece to linger in my memory and arouse my curiosity.
I knew the name of the artist, and I watched for him. Although Sehgal was very busy, thriving in the incubation culture of art fairs and international exhibitions, he did not surface in New York until his inaugural show at the Marian Goodman Gallery in November 2007. This time when I walked into the exhibition space, I had more of an idea of what to expect, but once again I was knocked off-balance. “Welcome to this situation,” a group of six people said in unison to greet me, ending with the auditory flourish of a sharp intake of breath; then they slowly backed off, all the while facing me, and froze into unnatural positions. At which point one of the group recited a quotation: “In 1958, somebody said, ‘The income that men derive producing things of slight consequence is of great consequence.’ ” Jumping off from that statement, the conversationalists — Sehgal refers to them as “interpreters” — began a lively back and forth. Occasionally one of the six might turn to a gallery visitor and utter a compliment or say, “Or what do you think?” and then incorporate that person’s comment into the exchange of words. Mostly they seemed content to natter at high velocity among themselves. It all continued until the moment when a new visitor arrived, an event that acted as a sort of rewind button. “Welcome to this situation,” they chanted again, breathing in and backing off as they had done before and then assuming another stylized stance. A new quotation was dropped and another discussion commenced. Just as in Berlin, I felt a battleground developing in my mind, between a fascinated desire to stay and a disquieted urge to flee.
If you are not a devotee of the cult of contemporary art, especially its Conceptualist cadre, you may feel a whirring sensation beneath your eyelids starting up right about now. Your skepticism isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a matter of “Is this art?” Almost a century has elapsed since Marcel Duchamp aced that one by attaching titles to everyday objects (a urinal, a bicycle wheel) and demonstrating that anything can be art if the artist says it is. Nevertheless, the ineffaceable critical question remains: “Is it good art?” Later this month, when Sehgal’s one-man show takes over the Guggenheim Museum’s rotunda for a six-week run, thousands of noninitiates, many no doubt having come to see the Frank Lloyd Wright building without any advance notification of what art exhibitions are on, will be able to decide for themselves.
If the overall response to “This Situation” at the Marian Goodman Gallery is any guide, even some who expect to hate Sehgal’s work will leave enthralled. “I often see shows I don’t like, but this was the only show I’ve ever seen that didn’t like me,” wrote New York magazine’s art critic, Jerry Saltz, judging “This Situation” to be the best exhibition he encountered in 2008. Unlike so much of contemporary art, Sehgal’s art evokes passionate reactions among the unschooled as well as the cognoscenti. Anyone who has seen the onlookers trudging passively through an art museum (all too often the Guggenheim ramp resembles the humane cattle slaughterhouses designed by Temple Grandin) can appreciate the achievement. What fascinates me about Sehgal is that working only with human clay, he can call forth thoughtful and visceral responses from people who remain unmoved by more conventional paintings and sculptures. When I expressed this to him, he laughed at me. “I’m more ambitious than that,” he said. “That’s too little of a game.”
At any time of day, Sehgal, who is 33, looks as if he has just tumbled out of bed. His tousled hair is innocent of exposure to a brush. His overcoat long ago parted company with its lining. In the six months since we first met, I have usually seen him in the same black jeans, black one-button pullover and white sneakers. My initial impression was that this was a man who was completely careless about his appearance, but I eventually concluded that the scrupulous inattention to wardrobe and grooming was of a piece with his refusal to fly on airplanes (visiting America from his home in Berlin, he travels by ship) or to carry a cellphone. More to the point, this conspicuous avoidance of unnecessary consumption conforms to the credo that underlies his work. Sehgal makes art that does not require the transformation of any materials. He refuses to add objects to a society that he says is overly encumbered with them.
It’s his rigorous devotion to an art that vanishes instantly that Sehgal and his curators emphasize. “There’s a purity to his approach,” says Catherine Wood, the curator of contemporary art and performance at the Tate Modern in London. “There are a few artists who are making live action that is based in sculpture, but what sets him apart is his purist insistence on the immateriality — or ephemeral materiality — of the work, so it crystallizes and disperses again, so there is no trace left at all.” Fifty years ago, Yves Klein sold empty spaces in Paris in return for gold; the buyers received a certificate of ownership. In the conceptual art that flowered in the late 1960s and early ’70s, artists like Bruce Nauman, Dan Graham, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas and Lynda Benglis performed before a camera; the videotape documented that action and became a commodity that could be sold by an art dealer. Around the same time, Michael Asher and Daniel Buren were staging interventions in art museums, removing panels from the building facade or paintings from the wall and calling attention to the change; if you are interested, you can check out the installation photographs. Then and now, the gallery that represents Ian Wilson will sell you the right to have a discussion with the artist; once it has occurred, the conversation is commemorated with a certificate that belongs to you. In their flight from the object-based art market, these Conceptualist and post-Minimalist artists left behind them, like bread crumbs, objects that provided a path back in.
In contrast, Sehgal is an absolutist. He does not allow his pieces to be photographed. They are not explained by wall labels or accompanied by catalogs. No press releases herald the openings of his exhibitions; indeed, there are no official openings, just unceremonious start dates. All of this can engender skepticism, but the aspect of Sehgal’s work that his detractors find most irritating is the way the art is sold. First of all, there is the fact that it is sold, just as if it were made of, say, cast bronze: in editions of four to six (with Sehgal retaining an additional “artist’s proof”) at prices between $85,000 and $145,000 apiece. Unlike some of his Conceptualist predecessors, Sehgal is totally unapologetic about the fact that his work is commercially traded. “The market is something you can’t be outside of and you can’t want to be outside of, if you are doing anything specialized,” he told an audience last May at the Museum of Modern Art, which bought “Kiss” in 2008 in a transaction that the museum’s director, Glenn Lowry, deemed “one of the most elaborate and difficult acquisitions we have ever made.”
As far as money goes, at a museum-discount price of $70,000 it was a minor MoMA purchase; but Lowry was not overstating the cost of time and energy. Since there can be no written contract, the sale of a Sehgal piece must be conducted orally, with a lawyer or a notary public on hand to witness it. The work is described; the right to install it for an unspecified number of times under the supervision of Sehgal or one of his representatives is stipulated; and the price is stated. The buyer agrees to certain restrictions, perhaps the most important being the ban on future documentation, which extends to any subsequent transfers of ownership. “If the work gets resold, it has to be done in the same way it was acquired originally,” says Jan Mot, who is Sehgal’s dealer in Brussels. “If it is not done according to the conditions of the first sale, one could debate whether it was an authentic sale. It’s like making a false Tino Sehgal, if you start making documentation and a certificate.”
The act of going to a logical extreme can have illuminating results. Yasmil Raymond, who worked at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for five years before becoming a curator at the Dia Art Foundation in New York, says that the Walker’s acquisition of a Sehgal work, “This Objective of That Object,” was the most contentious in her time there. In the piece, five interpreters surround a visitor, turn their backs to her and declaim, “The objective of this work is to become the object of a discussion.” If the visitor says nothing, the interpreters will eventually crumple to the floor; but a response will reanimate them, and one of them will cry, “A comment, a comment, we have a comment!” And at that, with the visitor’s comment as a starting point, a conversation begins. What is curious is that the purchase of the work generated its own passionate discussion. “At the Walker, they have six board meetings a year, and this was the most difficult one I ever was at,” Raymond says. “It was the only time someone on the acquisitions committee voted against an acquisition. There was a small insurrection. Three people abstained, and one voted against it. It was a polemical reaction. Then all the other board members had to defend and insist on why they were voting for this. They were really articulate on why the Walker had to acquire the work, about supporting unsafe ideas, on the risk of creativity and artistic practice.” It was exactly the kind of conversation Sehgal hopes to provoke.
Over the course of a career barely a decade long, Sehgal has produced two kinds of art. The earliest works, like “Kiss,” are silent and sculptural: a viewer encounters a piece in a museum or gallery just as if it were a marble statue. Sehgal is adamant that he is producing a work of art, not theater: unlike a performance, a Sehgal is on display for the entire time the institution is open, and the human actors are identified no more precisely than as if they were bronze or marble. (They are, however, paid.) But because the piece is formed of people, not of metal or stone, the viewer is aware that, regardless of how absorbed the models seem to be in their activity, at any moment they have the capability of turning their gaze on him — as, indeed, they periodically do in “Kiss.” That potential for interaction is explored extensively in Sehgal’s second line of work, the “constructed situations” (like “This Situation”), in which the visitor is drawn in and becomes a participant.
Residing in the ether of spoken instructions and ephemeral enactment, these pieces can misleadingly appear to be slapdash or freely improvisatory. In fact, Sehgal supervises his work with painstaking care, in the unremitting state of anxiety of a control freak who has opted to work in an uncontrollable milieu. “These pieces are very delicate,” Raymond observes. “The human being is such an explosive material. You have to treat it delicately and sometimes put pressure on it. We’re dealing with the most fragile of all material — the human mind.”
In the Guggenheim show, “Kiss” will be on view on the ground floor, but the main work is a constructed situation that dates from 2006 and has been installed twice in Europe. At Sehgal’s insistence, and for the sake of allowing a visitor to experience the piece with something like the Edenic innocence in which I fell upon “Kiss,” I won’t divulge what happens other than to say that on the spiral ramp of the rotunda, each individual or group will be engaged in conversation by several different interpreters of very different ages. To install the work, Sehgal must enlist the interpreters, train them and, finally, cajole them into showing up regularly and keeping up their enthusiasm.
First comes the recruitment. For older candidates, many of whom are college instructors, Sehgal relied on recommendations and then held lengthy personal interviews during the past year. The younger ones he and his team had to find in casting calls. If you regard Sehgal as a 21st-century sculptor who abjures digging stone out of a ravaged earth, then the interviews that he conducted of grade-school children and teenage college students throughout the city were the ecologically informed equivalent of the scouting missions that Michelangelo made to the marble quarries of Carrara. The small children he sought were between ages 8 and 12, while the teenagers were typically college freshmen. Like the older interpreters, the teenagers would be required to converse in an interesting and intelligent way, but the children had to be able chiefly to encapsulate what they were told in a summary form. They also needed to be outgoing enough to chat readily with strangers. In November, I watched Sehgal, accompanied by a Guggenheim assistant curator and professionals from a New York-based casting agency, interview groups of little kids and teenagers, usually eight at a time.
One sample of children came mostly from St. Ann’s School, a private school in Brooklyn. “I’m just going to ask what your name is and how old you are and what you like doing, and then after we’re going to play a little game,” Sehgal announced, as he would say in pretty much precisely those words at every audition of children. An 8-year-old boy with a piping voice and charming self-possession said, “The last thing I’ve done is create a litmus solution.” An 8-year-old girl favored musical comedy. The others had equally enriching extracurricular activities to report.
Then it was time for the game, which Sehgal explained would begin simply and become more difficult. The game consisted of listening to the answer to a question and then repeating what was said. Taking suggestions for a question from the children, he chose, “What is a stool?”
A young woman from the casting agency said: “A stool is a piece of furniture that has four legs and usually is taller than a chair. You can sit on a stool, and sometimes you can climb on a stool to get something.”
The children raised their hands to offer their recaps. Like the blind men around the elephant, they would get different parts of it. Sehgal listened. From those who did not volunteer, he tried to coax a response.
The game escalated to “What is a computer?” and then “What is a democracy?”
“A democracy is a system of government where the citizens of the country elect their leader,” said another casting agent. “The United States is a democracy. The hope is that in electing a leader, the voice of the people will be heard through that representative. The opposite of a democracy is a dictatorship, where one person has all the say and all the power.”
Now we were in deeper waters. Most of the children had trouble pronouncing the word “democracy,” and their capacity to recall and regurgitate the disjointed bits of information varied appreciably. With the final question — “What is an abstraction?” — things became more challenging still. Forget about pronunciation or any comprehension of the term. What they came back with was a mixture of things they remembered and things they made up. Those whose recollections outdistanced their imaginations were the preferred ones, so long as they were not incapacitated by shyness.
Afterward Sehgal reviewed the young contestants with his associates, each of whom had written down ratings. He compared the students with ones they had recently seen at the Thurgood Marshall Academy in Harlem, where he found a higher proportion of promising candidates adept at reciting back what they heard.
“The thing about these St. Ann’s kids is they’re socially very able,” he told me. “The Thurgood Marshall kids are put in the world to receive — they are there to pay attention. It’s not that the St. Ann’s kids are not intelligent. They are. They are already in the mind-set of ‘What can I bring into the world out of myself?’ ”
For the Guggenheim exhibition, such qualities would be more appropriate in the teenage interpreters. The artist’s quarrying continued.
As a youth, Sehgal was attracted to the study of dance (how people move) and political economy (how society works). His father, now retired, was an I.B.M. manager from India, his mother a German native and homemaker. Sehgal was born in London and raised primarily in Dusseldorf, Paris and a town close to Stuttgart; he has a younger sister, who grew up to become a philosopher specializing in Alfred North Whitehead. Their father talked with them in English, their mother in German. Sehgal speaks fluent English with a faint German inflection.
When he was an adolescent, Sehgal says, a direct encounter with the political process disenchanted him permanently from parliamentary politics. Friends asked him to speak at a hearing in favor of a transportation initiative in Stuttgart. “I remember seeing the minister of transportation dive and dodge,” he says. “All he could do was administer what the public opinion was, or else he would be voted out in the next election.” If electoral politics could not produce fundamental change, why bother with it? “It’s much more interesting to change the values,” he says. “I was never interested again in parliamentary politics. I became interested in culture.”
This political awakening strengthened his attraction to dance. Aside from its physical appeal, dance, in his eyes, had the virtue of creating something that disappeared at the moment it was produced. “My work comes out of my experiment with myself,” he says. “As a person in the first world, you’re quite heavy as a person in what you use up. Can I actually solve this for myself? Can I have something to do, keep myself interested and not be somebody who is situated outside society, and can I do this without transforming lots of material?” He moved at age 18 to Berlin, where he studied political economy and dance. After a few years he relocated to Essen, again taking classes in both subjects.
Through friends in Berlin, he became friendly with the experimental choreographer Xavier Le Roy and later with another avant-garde dance artist, Jérôme Bel, who were challenging the preconceptions that audiences brought to dance performances. In 1999, he took a job in Ghent, Belgium, at Les Ballets C. de la B. dance collective. At the same time, he was developing his own work. His first noteworthy piece was called “Twenty Minutes for the Twentieth Century,” in which he performed by himself, naked, on a stage decorated with only a work light, calling up signature movements in 20 styles: Nijinsky, Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, down to Xavier Le Roy. (Notwithstanding its title, the piece was approximately 55 minutes long.)
He presented “Twenty Minutes” in a festival at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where one appreciative spectator was a curator of about the same age, Jens Hoffmann. “Afterward I told him it was like a museum of dance,” Hoffmann recalls. “He said, ‘This is exactly what I was trying to do.’ ” Sehgal was more of a conceptual artist than a choreographer. “I always felt closer to Marcel Broodthaers than I did to Martha Graham,” he says. He loves the intellectual discourse that surrounds contemporary art; it’s absent from dance criticism. (He carries these preferences into his private life. His partner, Dorothea von Hantelmann, is an art historian who has written extensively about “performativity” in visual art; they have a 2-year-old son, Nalin.) Hoffmann encouraged him to present his work in art venues, not dance theaters.
As a curator of the Manifesta biennial art exhibition in Frankfurt in 2003, Hoffmann brought “Instead of Allowing Some Thing to Rise Up to Your Face Dancing Bruce and Dan and Other Things” (2000), a piece that Sehgal had devised specifically for a contemporary art museum, the S.M.A.K. in Ghent. As its unwieldy title indicates to those in the know, it is a gloss on pieces of conceptual art of the early ’70s by Bruce Nauman and Dan Graham. In those earlier works, the artist or a friend of the artist performs a series of stipulated movements, which are captured on a videotape for display in a gallery or museum. Sehgal selected 16 gestural moments from those videos and asked a performer to stitch them together with slowed-down, unaccented motions. He got the S.M.A.K. to agree to show the work nonstop during museum hours for a week; as one performer’s shift was ending, a successor would appear and writhe alongside him for about half a minute, and then the first one would depart. In a blatant way, human beings were filling the role that sculptures occupy in a museum.
“When I saw the visitors’ reaction, I was clear that this was it,” Sehgal says. “Their reactions were so much stronger than I expected. They couldn’t believe it was a person. They thought it had to be a robot or a puppet. There was such an expectation that in a museum something must be an object.”
Once he decided to transform choreographic material into sculpture, Sehgal needed to find a way to keep a piece going continuously. The silent interpreters in the early works perform in a loop, and the only visible connecting hinge occurs at a shift change, when one actor relieves another. That was relatively simple.
With “This Is Good” (2001), the first of his constructed situations, each new arrival of a visitor triggers an activity of limited duration; it is as if the piece were a kinetic sculpture powered by a push button. When someone enters the gallery, a guard begins windmilling his arms and hopping from one leg to the other and then says: “Tino Sehgal. ‘This Is Good.’ 2001.” Calling attention to the usually unnoticed employees in a museum, the piece plays off Sehgal’s mission to make people, not objects, the material of his work. But the payoff is limited. Things got more interesting with “This Is Exchange” (2003), in which the visitor is enlisted as a co-producer of the piece. At the entrance to the museum, a ticket taker asks the visitor to engage in a conversation about the market economy; after five minutes, if a ticket buyer who agreed to the request is still gamely playing along, she receives a partial refund of the admission fee. For many visitors, especially those who argued that they detested the market economy, it came as an unsettling surprise to receive this reminder that whatever their opinion of it, they were nonetheless immersed in it. Which, of course, was one of Sehgal’s aims.
Although Sehgal sells pieces to private collectors, his work seems to function best in a museum or a gallery, where its subtraction of a material object is made visible by the institutional surroundings that give shape to his void. “My work definitely needs this framing as art, and the stronger this framing is,” he says, “the more works of mine are possible.” Because the activity in his work is so close to the routines of everyday life, he has found ways to emphasize its artificiality. One signature device is the removal of all emphases in movement; his interpreters proceed in a slow trancelike state. “The most important thing is you don’t see an accent,” he said at a “Kiss” rehearsal I attended. “In everyday life, basically, in whatever we do there is an accent. Here, there is a continuous flow.”
Eliminating the object has opened a seemingly limitless number of possibilities for Sehgal. At the C.C.A. Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, Jens Hoffmann, who became the director in 2006, has been presenting an ongoing series of Sehgal pieces. Usually visitors to this small contemporary art museum realize fairly soon that they are in the presence of a Sehgal work. But not always. In one piece, a visitor would arrive to find the museum apparently empty of all people. “Once when a person thought there were no guards around, he started stealing catalogs,” Hoffmann recalls. “The guard came up and said: ‘Would you please put the books back? This is a piece by Tino Sehgal.’ ”
Is it possible to be both playful and profound? Sehgal is wagering yes. The moral earnestness that underlies his work would be ponderous if unleavened by humor; the games would be just child’s sport if they did not illuminate serious matters. The mixture can confuse people. At a meeting that Sehgal, on one of his human-quarrying forays, held last May with the administrators of a Harlem after-school program, he was pressed to explain what he aimed to accomplish in the Guggenheim piece. “The real deal is what happens there,” he said. “The real deal is the conversation.” For an educator who was trying to wean children from the cycle of poverty, this was palpably an unsatisfactory answer. He asked Sehgal again what was his goal. “It’s a structure to have a conversation about people’s values,” Sehgal said.
A little later in the discussion, the man returned to his theme. “So I guess you’re saying your ambition is to change perception,” he said. “Is that correct?” And this time, Sehgal took the bait.
“That’s a very simple way of saying what I’m doing,” he said. “For the last two or three hundred years in human society, we have been very focused on the earth. We have been transforming the materials of the earth, and the museum has developed also over the last two or three hundred years as a temple of objects made from the earth. I’m the guy who comes in and says: ‘I’m bored with that. I don’t think it’s that interesting, and it’s not sustainable.’ Inside this temple of objects, I refocus attention to human relations.”
This time the man nodded in understanding, with an expression I recognized. He was seeing things from another perspective, as he participated in a conversation within a framework constructed by Tino Sehgal.
-ARTHUR LUBOW for The New York Times Magazine
Though the Magazine article was accompanied by some photographs, I choose not to post those images in order to truly adhere to Sehgal's philosophy behind his art. Those interested in seeing omitted images, click on the post title.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Violence Blooms
Photographs: © Richard Bolai
Adele Todd is a
Vinod Dave came across her recent exhibit “Violence Blooms” while surfing the net and was struck by its impact. In the resulting interview, Ms.Todd reveals the inner depths of her work and provides insight into its various facets with candid frankness:
Vinod Dave: You were inspired nearly four years back, while you were in china, by some curtains embroidered with flowers. This long time between inspiration and actually creating something seems remarkable. Is this how you always work or this was so only in this project?
Adele Todd: In a day there are many things to consider, preparing my class work for my teaching, doing a project as a freelance designer and taking care of a three year old. Despite the best intentions, sometimes some work takes much longer than expected. Naturally many drawings are done and much thought is given to how to proceed and for me, I also always ask the question why? Why create this? What is it about this topic that makes me want to make the effort to commit to it?
VD: Also because of the time consuming nature of embroidery, may be?
AT: Embroidery has been proven to be my present medium of choice, along with Performance. There is much to recommend it, the color, the texture, the history and to me, the cotemporary possibilities. I am not limited to embroidery.
VD: Do you consider your work ‘feminist’ or ‘feminine’ and since you use mediums most used by females in the traditional way?
AT: I have no interest in considering my work ‘feminine’,
VD: Embroidery also has an inherent element in it related to decorative arts or crafts. How do you justify the subject of violence that may be considered in conflict with the decorative?
AT: That is wholly where the interest lies. I enjoy contradiction in art. I find greater regard for subtle observation, where the appearance of the sublime is subverted.
VD: When I mention ‘decorative’, what I mean is the medium’s traditional purpose. However, violence could be very ‘decorative’ or “attractive” at moments. I remember one senior American artist (Irving Kriesberg) asking me the same question after seeing my print news media based work dealing with social violence. My work at that time had element of splattered enamel paint on manipulated news photographs of actual human violence (that actually happened somewhere). My answer to him at that time was: violence commands people’s attention as much as pretty elements do and I want my work to do just do that. Are you in agreement with this or you having something beyond this theory?
AT: This is so true. It is very disturbing that particularly in American culture, a culture that is exported to much of the world through television, movies and the Internet, that violence is sound tracked and enhanced by beautiful looking people acting roles.
Violence and sex are very immediate triggers. As a graphic artist, aware of selling, I cannot help but observe these two elements.
Sex and Death is that all there is? Of course not, but they sell very well. What’s funny is that this isn’t new, it has always been so. From the Laocoon Group by Agesander, Hieronymous Bosch’s
(PS: My recent work that can be seen in
VD: I asked because I thought so in the first place.
Also your training in graphic design at the Pratt – is that a driving force leading you towards using certain mediums, the way you execute and the choice of way of expressing?
AT: My training, my experiences, my observations, all influences my choice of mediums and media.
VD: Performance and self-involvement seem to be part of most of your art projects. It also becomes an act of story-telling. Is this because you want to do it that way for some reason or you are interested in mixed-media/multi-media interconnections that tend to tell the whole story from various angles without opting out anything? If so, do you thing one needs more than one aspect of expression in order to tell it in a complete way? You also divide the story telling in intervals that count as day/s.
AT: I am very excited about media, all types, used in art. I would use my cell phone to explore showing my work if I have to. Use everything to get the message across. I suppose this is because of my design background. It makes me thing of purpose all the time. So I love to engage my students in outdoor art projects or creating zines and blogs. Not everyone gets what I am trying to encourage, it is an uphill struggle would you believe it. So many people complain that artists are not taken seriously, they can’t get a show etc…but that’s all they do, complain.
So, really creative art does not come from this region much, and when it does, it is imitative.
A mix of media expands choices, expands possibilities. For me, I like to say, I go where the idea demands me to go. I plan on doing a short DVD of older women talking about their sexual lives for a body of work on female sexuality called ‘Stain”. I am looking at the fact that although we live in a less sexually oppressive world, women can still find themselves on the wrong side of the moral sexual divide.
VD: Violence Blooms, at first looks completely organic, then ‘decorative’ (like flowers blooming on plants). Then as one observes closely, elements of violence emerge. That bears potentials of awe and shock strategy. Was this your purpose using this strategy for a reason?
AT: It was exactly my purpose, and when I was in
VD: The initially blooming decorativeness turns into shocking violence. I think that way of suggesting violence has more power than bringing one directly to a scene of blood stained dismembered bodies.
AT: I think so too. The plan was to create four of these floral targets, using all of our familiar red flowers.
With the viewer either connecting them from a distance as a large red mass, then on closer examination seeing the floral detail and finally seeing the violence hidden among the blooms. This is how I feel about crime in my country. It is my statement.
VD: Many of your works also pulsate with a ‘crime scene’-like quality. Is living in a crime saturated environment behind that element? We all live in a crime-infested environment no matter where we live in the world today. Is
AT: For many of us in
It does not help that murders are on the front pages very often in our media, so there is sensationalism and a glamorization factor to it that our media seem oblivious to changing. But lately, I see them trying a bit more to push such things down a bit and to focus on more edifying things.
VD: You also talk of thieves. Thieves can be sneaky and often non-violent. You seem to be very aware of crime in general. Is your definition of crime more personal or political? Your work seems to be dealing with the personal rather than general. Or is that more of a social commentary Can you comment on this?
AT: A friend of mine has a theory that one must be careful not to make self fulfilling prophecy in your work. It has come home to me in my life, the life of my friends, it does seem that observing a particular thing makes it grow in attention. Yet, as an artist, we never know what our role means ultimately. I started to work in 1998/9 in earnest because I could not see myself creating sweet potboilers that sell extremely lucratively by the way and help many artists live quite well. I saw so many things that needed addressing, and it was my upset that compelled me forward. It was not a judgment on those who want to create pretty things. I just felt that we as a country also have a space to explore the present as we move forward.
VD: I sense in a subtle way elements of eroticism in many of your work. Is that intentional? Do you see a comparative relation between the erotic combat and the actual violence?
AT: The erotic is something that I am looking at much more. It is interesting that you mention it. Going so far into violence demands a retreat or I should say, a reversal or rebounding. It is a hard, wearying topic, and there are other things that consume the mind. My carnival portrayal of one of Aubrey Beardsley’s drawings, was such a diversion. I wanted to observe the male by playing up male genitalia, unseen in the history of our masquerade for a woman to do.
I am very interested in the idea of this type of observance.
VD: This work has unusual exhibition space. Is it a public forest or a private garden? Do you often have concerns about where to exhibit because many of your work would not fit into a regular gallery setting?
AT: I do indeed have difficulty with places to show, and so I have become radical about it. I have decided that I will show anywhere I can.
VD: Your embroidered line often resemble to dripping blood stains. Is that for the subject enhancement?
Thread, fabric, and needle – all these have delicate balance with femininity and at the same time you electrify them with something as harsh as violence. Does the act of embroidery itself stand for violent act of piecing or stabbing? Do you identify yourself (since you many times become part of your work, almost performing the art work) with the violent human nature in its rawest form when you create? Does the act of creation and destruction become almost one when/if you do?
AT: The technique just seems right. When I began with looking at domestic violence, I did a great deal of research into the topic. I concluded that men featured prominently in the abuse, so I asked myself what happens with boys as they grow to manhood. What informs their aggression? For me, I like to understand the subject. I read everything I can, from newspaper articles to treatise from psychological journals…whatever it takes. I firmly believe that your work reflects honesty.
In Performance, getting inside the thinking of the thing is also extremely intimate and emotional. When I did my piece, “..When you dream wedding,” I recall wondering whether the impact would be strong enough, and one of the ladies who was working on preparing the space for me to do my work walked into the room, and I revealed the cutlass (a long knife) and she instantly stepped back and was visibly shaken.
It was that reaction that made me fully aware of the power of Performance.
So in other words, you cannot involve yourself in your work and hope to stand apart from it, even if you think you are not part of the experience.
VD: I myself seem to be obsessed with this subject, hence, I ask too much about aspects and nature of violence in your work. Hope you do not mind that. How does it feel to be a woman and behind this act (since traditions teach us otherwise - that women are more nurturing than ‘destructive’)? Also I notice reading about
AT: When I started working like this, no one was doing it. People came to my show and where quite surprised by the subject matter. Some wanted to know whether I was a victim. However, now, the wolf has been at too many doors for artists to ignore such subjects.
Also, when I started researching violence, boys and men dominated the question, but in only ten years women and girls have gone from victim to instigators in violence as well. As populations increase and resources shrink, this subject shall remain a very concerning one. The writer Octavia Butler and others who portray the future as harsh should not be proven right, but we seem unable and unwilling to prevent this reality from becoming possible. However, I really hope that we can succeed in leaving a better world for our children and their children.
VD: You talk about violence as part of growing up (in boys growing up into adulthood) somewhere. Do you say that as a cultural aspect or this is a gender issue? Is your work aimed at social change? Do you think it is possible to change anything via art?
AT: How wonderful it would be if my work could do so on a larger scale. It is a large part of why I persevere. It must be known that some of us did not just sit back and throw up our hands at what we saw in our society.
I strongly believe that Art can change the world. It may be overtly simplistic to say, but in some ways, didn’t
VD: Certain attractiveness permeates most of your works. As I said earlier, violence has this quality too. Are you consciously relating them since many of your titles also refer to the pleasant things in life (blooms, paradise, hope etc to name a few)?
AT: Yes, the names draw you in and lull your sense of comfort and expectation.
VD: I see more of the
AT: There is not enough exposure, not enough critical writing. Those who do both are a closed clique. Artists are suspicious of each others’ success (0r so it can seem)
Our government does not spend a great deal on exposing artists. Although this year with the
I would consider myself among them, It is true that my work may not be easy to make a mural of, but then, no one approached me with a brief either.
Vinod, thank you for the opportunity to discuss my work with you.
VD: Thank you for much insight.
Monday, November 30, 2009
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય
તારીખ તો બરાબર યાદ નથી, પણ વર્ષ ૧૯૫૭નું હતું. ભારતીય નૌકાદળનું યુદ્ધજહાજ INS રણજીત હિન્દી મહાસાગરમાં હંકારી રહ્યું હતું. મુંબઇથી મૂળ તો તે એડન જવા માટે નીકળેલું, પણ એડનમાં રોગચાળો ફાટી નીકળ્યાના સમાચાર મધદરિયે મળ્યા પછી જહાજે પૂર્વ આફ્રિકાની દિશા પકડી હતી. હવે તે કેન્યાના મોમ્બાસા બંદર તરફ આગળ વધી રહ્યું હતું. કાંઠો હજી કેટલાક કિલોમીટર દૂર હતો ત્યાં જહાજના વાયરલેસમાં મેસેજ ઝીલાયો. મેસેજ મોમ્બાસા બંદરેથી હતોઃ ‘આપના જહાજ પર વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય નામના પત્રકાર હાજર છે? જો હોય તો એમને જાણ કરો કે તેઓને મળવા માટે અહીં ગુજરાતીઓની ભીડ જામી છે.’‘નહિ, એ નામની કોઇ વ્યક્તિ અમારા જહાજ પર નથી!’ INS રણજીત પર ફરજ બજાવી રહેલા કોમોડર એસ. એમ. નન્દાએ પ્રત્યુત્તર આપ્યો. ‘અહીં એક જ પત્રકાર છે અને તેમનું નામ મિસ્ટર વાસુ છે, વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય નહિ.’ નન્દાએ ફોનનું રીસિવર મૂક્યું.આ સાંભળી કોમોડર નન્દાની બાજુમાં ઉભેલા પત્રકાર તરત બોલી ઉઠ્યા--‘એ હું જ છું... મારા વાચકો મને વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય તરીકે ઓળખે છે.’નન્દા આશ્ચર્ય પામી ગયા. સમુદ્રી પ્રવાસ દરમ્યાન મિસ્ટર વાસુ સાથે વિવિધ વિષયો પર વાતચીત કરતી વખતે તેમના અસીમ જ્ઞાનનો પરચો નન્દાને બરાબર મળ્યો હતો. પરિણામે નન્દા એટલું તો જાણતા હતા કે મિસ્ટર વાસુ સામાન્ય પત્રકાર ન હતા. આમ છતાં કોઇ પત્રકારને મળવા માટે પારકા દેશમાં લોકમેદની જામે એ કોમોડર નન્દા માટે કલ્પના બહારની વાત હતી. થોડી વારે જહાજ મોમ્બાસા પહોંચ્યું ત્યારે તો નન્દાનું આશ્ચર્ય ઓર વધ્યું. મિસ્ટર વાસુ ઉર્ફે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય જહાજમાંથી ઉતર્યા એટલે હારતોરા સાથે અનેક ગુજરાતીઓ તેમને ઘેરી વળ્યા. આ સૌ ગુજરાતીઓ મુંબઇથી પ્રગટ થતા અને પૂર્વ આફ્રિકામાં લગભગ ૨૨,૦૦૦ નકલોનો ફેલાવો ધરાવતા ‘જન્મભૂમિ પ્રવાસી’ અખબારના વાચકો હતા. સૌનો આનંદ એટલા માટે સમાતો નહોતો કે ‘પ્રવાસી’માં આખરી પાને ‘છેલ્લું પાનું’ શીર્ષક હેઠળ વર્ષોથી પીરસાતી જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનની અદ્ભૂત વાંચનસામગ્રીના કલમબાજ વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યને નજરોનજર જોવાનો લહાવો તેમને મળ્યો હતો.આ નાટ્યાત્મક પ્રસંગ આજે માનો યા ન માનો જેવો લાગે, પણ વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય માટે આવાં પ્રસંગો પત્રકારત્વમાં તેમની સાડા ચાર દાયકા લાંબી કારકિર્દી દરમ્યાન ઘણી વખત આવ્યાં. હિમાચલ, સોહમ્, ચાણક્ય, મુક્તાનંદ વિશ્વયાત્રી, પંડિત કૌશિક શર્મા, વિ. મુ. વાસુ, ગોસ્વામી શ્રી વિજયરાયજી, વિજયતુંગ, વાચસ્પતિ, ઇન્દ્રધનુ, વસંતવિજય વગેરે કુલ ૧૭ ઉપનામોએ તેમણે ૧૯૪૫ થી ૧૯૯૧ સુધી અનેક સામયિકોમાં તેમજ અખબારોમાં જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનનાં વિવિધ વિષયો પર હજારો લેખો આપ્યા. ખગોળશાસ્ત્ર હોય કે કીટકસૃષ્ટિ, પ્રાણીજગત હોય કે વનસ્પતિજગત, ભૂસ્તરશાસ્ત્ર હોય કે ભૌતિકશાસ્ત્ર, વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યની પકડ દરેક વિષય પર હતી. વળી મજૂબત હતી. જે તે વિષયમાં તેમનું પાંડિત્ય તો ખરૂં, ઉપરાંત અઘરામાં અઘરા વિષયને સરળ ભાષામાં રજૂ કરવાની અનોખી શૈલી તેમની પાસે હતી. આ બેઉ ખૂબીઓના સમન્વયે લાખો ગુજરાતી વાચકોને વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યની કલમના ચાહક બનાવ્યા હતા.આજથી બરાબર ૧૦૦ વર્ષ પહેલાં માર્ચ ૨૬, ૧૯૦૯ ના રોજ વિજયશંકર મુરારજી વાસુ તરીકે પોરબંદરમાં જન્મેલા વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યએ માધ્યમિક શિક્ષણ પોરબંદરની ભાવસિંહજી હાઇસ્કૂલમાં લીધું. ૧૯૩૩માં મુંબઇમાં વકીલાત ભણીને પોરબંદર પાછા ફર્યા અને વકીલાત શરૂ કરી. ચાર વર્ષ પછી દીવાની અને ફોજદારી અદાલતમાં ન્યાયાધીશ તરીકેનો હોદ્દો સંભાળ્યો. મૂળ જીવ લેખકનો અને વળી પક્ષીદર્શનનો ભારે શોખ, એટલે પક્ષીઓ વિશે પોતાનું ઊંડું જ્ઞાન લેખોના સ્વરૂપે વ્યક્ત કરે અને તે લેખો ‘પ્રકૃત્તિ’ નામના સામયિકમાં નિયમિત રીતે છપાય.માણસના જીવનમાં અમુક પ્રસંગો ટર્નંિગ પોઇન્ટ સાબિત થતા હોય છે. પોરબંદરના ન્યાયાધીશ વિજયશંકર વાસુને વખત જતાં વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય બનાવવામાં નિમિત્ત બનેલો પ્રસંગ ૧૯૪૪માં આકસ્મિક રીતે જ બન્યો. થયું એવું કે મુંબઇમાં ગોરી સરકાર સામે આઝાદીની લડત ચલાવી રહેલા ડૉ. વસંત અવસરે નામના ક્રાંતિકારી સાથે વિજયશંકરનો ભેટો થયો. બ્રિટિશ સરકાર સામે ‘આંદોલન’ કર્યાના આરોપસર અવસરે અને તેમના સાથીદારોના નામે મુંબઇમાં અરેસ્ટ વૉરન્ટ જારી થયું હતું, એટલે ગિરફ્તારીથી બચવા એ ક્રાંતિકારી ડૉક્ટર મુંબઇથી નાસતા છૂપાતા પોરબંદર પહોંચ્યા હતા. વિજયશંકર વાસુને તેમણે પોતાનો કેસ લડવા વિનંતી કરી ત્યારે જવાબ મળ્યો, ‘ચિંતા નહિ કરો. તમારો કેસ હું લડીશ.’ ન્યાયાધીશ હોવાના નાતે જો કે એવું તેઓ કરી ન શકે, એટલે જજના મોભાદાર પદેથી તેમણે રાજીનામું આપ્યું. સામાન્ય વકીલની રૂએ ડૉ. અવસરેનો કેસ (વિનામૂલ્યે) લડવા માટે મુંબઇ ગયા અને અવસરેને ન્યાય અપાવ્યો.આ બનાવે વિજયશંકર વાસુની ન્યાયાધીશ તરીકેની કારકિર્દીને પૂર્ણવિરામ ભલે મૂકી દીધું, પણ બીજી તરફ તેમનામાં રહેલા લેખકજીવને બેઠો કરી દીધો. મુંબઇમાં વસી જવાના નિર્ણય સાથે ગોરધનદાસ શેઠની પેઢીમાં મહિને માત્ર રૂા.૭૫ ના પગારે વિજયશંકર ટાઇપિસ્ટ તરીકે જોડાયા. આર્થિક સંઘર્ષ થકવનારો હતો. આમ છતાં તેમણે પોતાનો લેખનશોખ જીવંત રાખ્યો અને ‘પ્રકૃત્તિ’ સામયિકમાં લેખો આપતા રહ્યા. કેટલાંક વર્ષ બાદ મુંબઇના પ્રતિષ્ઠિત ‘જન્મભૂમિ પ્રવાસી’ અખબાર સાથે જોડાવાનો તેમને મોકો મળ્યો અને વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યના નામે તેમણે ‘જન્મભૂમિ પ્રવાસી’ના અંતિમ પાને ‘છેલ્લું પાનું’માં પ્રાણીપંખીનાં લેખો આપવાનું શરૂ કર્યું. લેખોની સંખ્યા અને સાઇઝ શરૂઆતમાં સીમિત રહી, પરંતુ વખત જતાં બ્રહ્માંડ, વિજ્ઞાન, સમુદ્રસૃષ્ટિ, વનસ્પતિજગત વગેરે વિષયોને લગતાં વૈવિધ્યપૂર્ણ લેખો વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યની કલમે લખાતા ગયા તેમ ‘છેલ્લું પાનું’માં તેમને વધુ ને વધુ મહત્ત્વ અપાતું ગયું અને વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય છેવટે આખા પાનાનું લેખનસંપાદન કરતા થયા. ૧૯૭૩ ના અરસામાં ‘જન્મભૂમિ પ્રવાસી’ છોડ્યા પછી તેઓ ફ્રી લાન્સ પત્રકાર તરીકે અખબારોમાં તેમજ સામયિકોમાં માહિતીસભર લેખો આપવા લાગ્યા. દરમ્યાન ‘શેરખાન’, ‘કપિનાં પરાક્રમો’, ‘સિંહ વાઘની સોબતમાં’, ‘શિકારીની તરાપ’, ‘કીમિયાગર કબીર’, ‘હાથીના ટોળામાં’, ‘કચ્છથી કાશ્મીર સુધી લડી જાણ્યું જવાનોએ’, ‘કાશ્મીરનું અગ્નિસ્નાન’, ‘ઝગમગતું ઝવેરાત’, ‘સમુદ્રની અજાયબ જીવસૃષ્ટિ’, ‘પ્રકૃતિનાં લાડકવાયાં પંખીઓ’, ‘જિંદગી જિંદગી’ વગેરે પુસ્તકો પણ લખ્યાં.ગુજરાતી પત્રકારત્વમાં લગભગ ૪૬ વર્ષની લાંબી કારકિર્દી ભોગવવા છતાં વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય આર્થિક રીતે કદી બે પાંદડે થઇ ન શક્યા. ભારે મહેનતે તૈયાર કરાયેલા અકેક માહિતીસભર લેખનું યોગ્ય આર્થિક વળતર તેમને પ્રકાશકો તરફથી કદી મળ્યું નહિ. વળી ઊંચા વળતરની તેમણે કદી આશા કે અપેક્ષા રાખી પણ નહિ, એટલે જે મળ્યું તેનાથી સંતોષ માની સાદગીભયુર્ં જીવન તેમણે વીતાવ્યું. ગુજરાતી વાચકોને કંઇક નવું, રસાળ અને જ્ઞાનવર્ધક લખાણ પીરસવાની નેમ સાથે તેમણે કલમ ઉઠાવી હતી અને તે નેમને આજીવન તેઓ ચુસ્તપણે વળગી રહ્યા. પાછલી ઉંમરે આંખોનું તેજ ઘટવા છતાં, કમરનો દુખાવો એકધારો રહેતો હોવા છતાં અને પાર્કિન્સનનો અસાધ્ય રોગ લાગૂ પડ્યો હોવા છતાં તેમણે પોતાની કલમનું તેજ ઝાંખું પડવા દીધું નહિ. જીવનના અંતિમ દિવસો સુધી તેઓ લેખનકાર્યમાં વ્યસ્ત રહ્યા. લાંબી માંદગી બાદ જુલાઇ, ૧૯૯૨માં તેમણે વિદાય લીધી અને મૂલ્યનિષ્ઠ પત્રકારત્વનો અજોડ દાખલો બેસાડતા ગયા.જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનની જે કેડી વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યએ કંડારી એ કેડીને તેમના પુત્ર નગેન્દ્ર વિજયે પણ કારકિર્દી તરીકે પસંદ કરી. પિતાની જેમ જ્ઞાનવર્ધક અને લોકોપયોગી સાહિત્ય પીરસવા માટે જ પત્રકારત્વ ચલાવવાની નેમ સાથે નગેન્દ્ર વિજયે (૧૪ વર્ષની વયે) કલમ ઉઠાવી અને ‘સ્કોપ’ અને ‘સફારી’ જેવાં અભૂતપૂર્વ સામયિકો ગુજરાતને આપ્યાં. આ બેય સામયિકોએ વિજ્ઞાન જેવા અઘરા જણાતા વિષયમાં સરેરાશ ગુજરાતી વાચકને ઊંડો રસ લેતા કરી દીધો એને નગેન્દ્ર વિજયની સિદ્ધિ ગણવી રહી. નગેન્દ્ર વિજયે તેમની રસાળ કલમ વડે નવી પેઢીની વિચારશૈલી બદલી છે અને તેમના મગજમાં ચાલતી થોટ પ્રોસેસને ટૉપ ગિઅરમાં નાખી છે. પ્રત્યક્ષ રીતે તેમનાં જીવન બદલ્યાં છે. જુદી રીતે કહો તો સમાજલક્ષી તેમજ મૂલ્યનિષ્ઠ પત્રકારત્વ ચલાવવાના ઉચ્ચ સંસ્કારોનો પિતાએ આપેલો વારસો પુત્રએ બરાબર જાળવ્યો.આ લખનારે આજથી અઢારેક વર્ષ પહેલાં ‘સફારી’ના કાર્યાલયમાં પાર્સલો સીવવાના કાર્ય સાથે કારકિર્દીની શરૂઆત કરી ત્યારે એક સંકલ્પ કર્યો હતો--ગમે તે ભોગ આપવો પડે, પણ જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનનો શક્ય એટલો વધુ ફેલાવો કરવો. આ સંકલ્પના અન્વયે તમામ આર્થિક હિતો ભૂલીને ‘સફારી’ને એક ઝૂંબેશ તરીકે ચલાવ્યું, અંધજનો માટે ‘સફારી’ની શ્રાવ્ય આવૃત્તિ પ્રગટ કરી, ઇન્ટરનેટ પર ‘સફારી’ની વેબસાઇટ આરંભી અને અંગ્રેજી ભાષામાં ‘સફારી’નું પ્રકાશન શરૂ કર્યું.અલબત્ત, વાત ત્યાં પૂરી થતી નથી. હજી ઘણું કરવાનું બાકી છે. વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યની કલમે લખાયેલું સાહિત્ય પુસ્તક સ્વરૂપે આજની તેમજ આવતી કાલની પેઢી સુધી પહોંચતું કરવું છે; ભવિષ્યમાં ભારતની અન્ય ભાષાઓમાં ‘સફારી’નું પ્રકાશન શરૂ કરવું છે, જેથી નગેન્દ્ર વિજય લિખિત જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનના લેખો ભારતભરમાં પ્રાદેશિક લેવલે પહોંચી શકે અને વખત આવ્યે ગુજરાતમાં ક્યાંક ‘નગેન્દ્ર વિજય સાયન્સ સેન્ટર’ સ્થાપવું છે, જેથી નવી પેઢીમાં નાનપણથી જ વિજ્ઞાન પ્રત્યેનો અભિગમ કેળવી શકાય.આ બધી મારી ઇચ્છાઓ નથી, બલકે નેમ છે. સંકલ્પ છે. કલમયોગી પત્રકાર વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યના પૌત્ર હોવાના નાતે એમ કરવું મારી ફરજ પણ છે.
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કોઇ માણસ લોકપ્રિયતાના ભલે ગમે તેટલા ઊંચા શિખર પાર કરે, પણ સંસારમાંથી તે વિદાય લે ત્યાર બાદ તેને ભૂલી જવાનો માનવસહજ સ્વભાવ છે. પોરબંદરના સાહિત્યપ્રેમી વતનીઓને જો કે એ બાબતે અપવાદ ગણવા રહ્યા, જેમણે પોરબંદરની ધરતી પર માર્ચ ૨૬, ૧૯૦૯ના રોજ જન્મેલા વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યને તેમના અવસાનના સત્તર વર્ષે થયે પણ યાદ રાખ્યા છે.આ સદ્ગત લેખકની જન્મશતાબ્દિ નિમિત્તે જુલાઇ ૧૧, ૨૦૦૯ ના રોજ પોરબંદર ખાતે ત્યાંના આર્યસમાજના, કલરવ સાહિત્ય વિકાસ ટ્રસ્ટના તથા પુષ્કર્ણા બ્રહ્મસમાજના સંયુક્ત ઉપક્રમે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યના માનમાં સ્મરણાંજલિ કાર્યક્રમ યોજવામાં આવ્યો. પોરબંદરમાં વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યને જેમણે નજરોનજર જોયેલા તેવા શ્રી નરોત્તમ પલાણ જેવા પ્રખર વિદ્ધાનોની તથા રામજીભાઇ પાડલિયા જેવા સાહિત્યરસિકોની હાજરીએ તેમજ તેમના સંસ્મરણોએ પ્રસંગને સરસ ‘નોસ્ટાલ્જિક ટચ’ આપ્યો. કાર્યક્રમના અન્ય વક્તાઓએ પણ વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય વિશે કેટલીક રસપ્રદ વાતો કરી, જે પૈકી કેટલીક અમારા માટે પણ અજાણી હતી. આખરમાં કેટલાક યુવાન કવિઓએ પોતાની મૌલિક કવિતાઓ રજૂ કરીને પોરબંદરમાં જળવાયેલા સાહિત્યના વારસાનો વખાણવાલાયક પરચો આપ્યો.એકંદરે કાર્યક્રમ સુંદર તેમજ હ્ય્દયસ્પર્શી રહ્યો એ વાતનો આનંદ છે, પરંતુ વધુ આનંદ એ વાતે છે કે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યને પોરબંદરની પ્રેમાળ અને સાહિત્યરસિક પ્રજા હજી ભૂલી નથી. સંસારમાંથી વિદાય લીધાના લગભગ બે દાયકે પણ કોઇ લોકપ્રિય વ્યક્તિની લોકચાહના બરકરાર રહે એથી મોટી શ્રદ્ધાંજલિ તેના માટે બીજી શી હોઇ શકે?તા.ક. કાર્યક્રમના મુખ્ય અતિથિ તેમજ વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યના કલમવારસ નગેન્દ્ર વિજયે કાર્યક્રમમાં વ્યક્ત કરેલા પોતાના વિચારો અહીં બ્લોગના વાચકો માટે રજૂ કરૂં છું...
મૂળ વતનની ભૂમિ પર ઘણા વખતે ફરી પગ મૂક્યાનો જે સહજ આનંદ દરેક વ્યક્તિને હોય તે આજે હું પણ અનુભવી રહ્યો છું. વધુ પ્રબળ લાગણી જો કે પોરબંદર મારૂં મૂળ વતન હોવા બદલના તેમજ આપના જેવા સાહિત્યપ્રેમી અને જાગૃત પોરબંદરનિવાસીઓ પ્રત્યેના ગૌરવની છે. આજનો કાર્યક્રમ આયોજિત કરી આપ સૌએ મને અહીં હાજર રહેવાનો જે સુખદ મોકો આપ્યો છે તે હજી ટૂંક સમય પહેલાં મારી કલ્પના બહારનો હતો. મારા સદ્ગત પિતાજી વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યની જન્મશતાબ્દિના વર્ષે તેમની જન્મભૂમિ પર આટલી સહૃદયતા અને સ્નેહપૂર્વક તેમને યાદ કરાય એવી મને સ્વપ્નેય ધારણા ન હતી, કેમ કે સમયનું વહેણ જૂની સ્મૃત્તિઓને નિરંતર ઝાંખી પાડી અંતે ભુલાવી દેતું હોય છે.એક પેઢી બદલાઇ ચૂકી છે. આથી વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યની જન્મશતાબ્દિ મનાવવા માટે મારે શું કરવું તે મૂંઝવનારી સમસ્યા હતી. પ્રશ્ન એ થયો કે આજે કેટલા લોકો જાણતા હોય કે આજથી બરાબર ૧૦૦ વર્ષ પહેલાં પોરબંદરની ધરતી પર વિજયશંકર મુરારજી વાસુના નામે એક ભેખધારી વ્યક્તિ જન્મી હતી, જેણે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય એવું ઉપનામ ધારણ કર્યા બાદ સતત અડધી સદી સુધી ગુજરાતની પ્રજા માટે પોતાની રસાળ કલમ દ્વારા અખૂટ જ્ઞાનનો ધોધ વહાવ્યો હતો? આ સ્થિતિમાં જન્મશતાબ્દિ નિમિત્તે જે પણ પ્રવૃત્તિ હાથ ધરૂં તેમાં સૌ પ્રથમ તો વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય એટલે કોણ તેનો પરિચયાત્મક ખુલાસો મારે આપવો પડે, જે મને તેમની અનોખી સાહિત્યિક, સમાજલક્ષી અને સમૃદ્ધ કારકિર્દી જોતાં વિરોધાભાસ જેવું લાગતું હતું. પરંતુ સમયના વીતવા સાથે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય ભુલાવા માંડ્યા હોય એવી મારી ધારણાને આજના કાર્યક્રમે ભૂલભરેલી ઠરાવી છે--અને તે વાતનો મને આનંદ છે.આજથી સો વર્ષ પહેલાં વીસમી સદીના આરંભે મુરારજી વાસુ નામના જે કંદોઇને ત્યાં મારા પિતાનો જન્મ થયો તેમને આખું પોરબંદર ભોપા મહારાજ તરીકે જાણતું હતું--અને રાજદરબાર સુધી તેમની શાખ હતી. કંદોઇને ત્યાં જન્મેલા પુત્ર વિશે સાધારણ રીતે એવી અપેક્ષા રખાય કે મોટો થયા બાદ તે ખાજલી-પેંડા બનાવે અને પિતાની દુકાન સંભાળી લે. પરંતુ મારા પિતાજીના ભાગ્યમાં મિઠાઇનાં ખોખાં વચ્ચે નહિ, પણ પુસ્તકોનાં થોથાં વચ્ચે જીવવાનું તેમજ મિષ્ટાન્નને બદલે જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનના માહિતીલેખો રાંધવાનું લખાયું હતું. ભણતરનો વિષય કાયદાશાસ્ત્ર ખરો, પરંતુ રસના વિષયો પક્ષીશાસ્ત્રથી માંડીને ભૂસ્તરશાસ્ત્ર અને વનસ્પતિશાસ્ત્ર સુધીના અનેક હતા. પોરબંદરના ખાડીવિસ્તારમાં તેમજ આસપાસના વગડાઉ પ્રદેશમાં ઋતુપ્રવાસી પંખીડાનું નિરીક્ષણ કરવું, લાયબ્રેરીમાં કલાકો વીતાવવા, ‘પ્રકૃત્તિ’ નામના પ્રતિષ્ઠિત સામયિકમાં તેમજ બોમ્બે નેચરલ હિસ્ટરી સોસાયટીના જર્નલમાં પ્રાણી-પંખીઓ વિશે નવી જાણકારી લખવી વગેરે પ્રવૃત્તિઓ તેમના માટે કાયદાના અભ્યાસ કરતાં વિશેષ હતી. જ્ઞાન મેળવવું અને મેળવેલું જ્ઞાન કલમના માધ્યમ દ્વારા બહોળા સમાજને આપવું તે છેવટે તેમની મુખ્ય પ્રવૃત્તિ અને સરવાળે કારકિર્દી બની. વિજયશંકર મુરારજી વાસુને વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યની ભૂમિકા અપાવવામાં આપણા જાણીતા સાહિત્યરત્ન શ્રી ગુલાબદાસ બ્રોકર નિમિત્ત બન્યા. ન્યાયધીશના હોદ્દે પહોંચી ચૂકેલા મારા પિતાજીએ આઝાદીની લડત દરમ્યાન સંજોગવશાત્ પોરબંદર છોડીને મુંબઇમાં માસિક રૂ. ૭૫ના પગારે ટાઇપિસ્ટની નોકરી સ્વીકારવી પડી, જેના વડે કુટુમ્બનું ગુજરાન ચલાવવું મુશ્કેલ હતું. આ વાત મુંબઇમાં જ વસતા શ્રી ગુલાબદાસ બ્રોકરે જાણી ત્યારે તેમણે ‘જન્મભૂમિ’ દૈનિકના તંત્રી મોહનલાલ મહેતા ‘સોપાન’ સાથે મારા પિતાજીની ઓળખાણ કરાવી અને પિતાજીના લેખો છાપવાની ભલામણ કરી. ‘ક્યા વિષય પર લખવાનું ગમે ?’ એવો પ્રશ્ન તંત્રીએ પૂછ્યો ત્યારે પિતાજીએ પક્ષીપરિચયના વિષય પર પસંદગી ઢોળી. તંત્રી સહમત થયા. વારાફરતી અકેક પક્ષીનો અત્યંત રોચક અને રમતિયાળ શૈલીમાં પરિચય આપતા લેખો એટલા લોકભોગ્ય અને લોકપ્રિય નીવડ્યા કે ટૂંક સમય પછી ‘જન્મભૂમિ’ની રવિવારીય પૂર્તિમાં દરેક પક્ષીદીઠ આખું પાનું ફાળવવામાં આવ્યું. માત્ર એક બાબત તંત્રી મોહનલાલ મહેતા ‘સોપાન’ને ખટકતી હતી. પિતાનું નામ વિજયશંકર મુરારજી વાસુ, એટલે લેખક તરીકે તેઓ ટૂંકમાં વિ. મુ. વાસુ લખતા હતા. લેખોની ગુણવત્તા પાસે એ નામ ‘સોપાન’ને ફિક્કું લાગતું હતું. કોઇ પ્રભાવશાળી ઉપનામ અપનાવવાનું તેમણે સૂચવ્યું. વિ. મુ. વાસુ ત્યાર પછી વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય બન્યા, જેમાં વિજય તેમનું અસલ નામ હતું અને મારા દાદાના મુરારજી નામનું તેમણે મૌર્ય કરી નાખ્યું. વિજયની પાછળ ગુપ્ત એવો પ્રત્યય લાગવો તો સ્વાભાવિક હતો. ‘જન્મભૂમિ’ની રવિવારીય પૂર્તિ પ્રવાસીનો સંપૂર્ણ ચાર્જ સોંપાયા પછી તેમણે પંડિત કૌશિક શર્મા, હિમાચલ, મુક્તાનંદ વિશ્વયાત્રી વગેરે નવાં ઉપનામો ધારણ કર્યાં. પૂર્તિનો સૌથી લોકપ્રિય વિભાગ હોય તો ‘છેલ્લું પાનું’, જેણે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય નામ લોકજીભે રમતું કરી દીધું. મુંબઇમાં મારા વસવાટ દરમ્યાન મેં એવાં ઘર જોયાં છે કે જ્યાં રવિવારે ‘જન્મભૂમિપ્રવાસી’ની બબ્બે નકલો મંગાવવામાં આવતી હતી-જેથી ‘છેલ્લું પાનું’ પહેલાં વાંચવા માટે કુટુમ્બનાં સભ્યો વચ્ચે ગજગ્રાહ થાય નહિ. વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યને ગુજરાતભરમાં આવી જ લોકચાહના ‘અખંડ આનંદ’ માસિકમાં આપતી તેમની સવાલ-જવાબની કટાર ‘જ્ઞાનગોષ્ઠિ’એ અપાવી. મને યાદ છે કે એક વાર ઓપરેશન માટે હોસ્પિટલમાં તેમણે અઠવાડિયું રોકાવાનું થયું અને એક અંક પૂરતી ‘જ્ઞાનગોષ્ઠિ’ની કોલમ લખવાની અસમર્થતા તેમણે દર્શાવી ત્યારે અખંડ આનંદ ટ્રસ્ટના મુખ્ય ટ્રસ્ટી મનુ સુબેદારે મેગેઝિનનું પ્રકાશન દસ દિવસ માટે અટકાવ્યું હતું. ‘અખંડ આનંદ’નો અંક ‘જ્ઞાનગોષ્ઠિ’ વિભાગ વગરનો પ્રસિદ્ધ થાય એ મનુ સુબેદારને માન્ય ન હતું, કારણ કે વાચકો એ વિભાગની ખોટ ચલાવી ન લે એવી તેમને ખાતરી હતી.જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનના અનેક વિષયોને વાચકો માટે રસપ્રદ બનાવી જાણતા મારા પિતાને જે મામૂલી આર્થિક મળતર મળતું તે મને પહેલેથી કઠતું રહ્યું હતું. પુરસ્કારની રકમ વધારવા માટે તેઓ ક્યારેય માગણી ન કરતા તે પણ મને ગમતું નહિ. આ બાબત અંગે ક્યારેક હું બળાપો કરૂં ત્યારે તેમનો જવાબ એ હોય કે, ‘મારા થકી વાચકોને જ્ઞાન મળે છે એ જ મારો પુરસ્કાર છે.’આ વાક્ય શરૂ શરૂમાં તો મને જચતું નહિ, પણ જાણ્યેઅજાણ્યે છેવટે તે મારૂં જીવનસૂત્ર બન્યું. ‘સ્કોપ’ અને ‘સફારી’ જેવાં જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનનાં સામયિકો હું પ્રકાશિત કરી શક્યો હોય તો એ મારા પિતાની ઊચ્ચ વિચારધારાને આભારી છે. આજે ‘સફારી’ ગુજરાતનું બહોળો ફેલાવો ધરાવતું અકેમાત્ર મેગેઝિન છે કે જેમાં એક પણ જાહેરખબર લેવાતી નથી. પહેલા કવરથી છેલ્લા કવર સુધી વાચકો માટે જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનનો ભંડાર જ ખડકેલો હોય છે. ‘સફારી’ની ઓડિયો સી.ડી. પ્રગટ કરાય છે, જે તેમને વિનામૂલ્યે આપવામાં આવે છે. આ બધાનું શ્રેય મારા પિતાજીને જાય છે, છતાં એક વાતની ચોખવટ કરૂં કે પિતાની ઊચ્ચ વિચારધારાને હું જીવનમાં ઊતારી શક્યો અને ઊંચી કક્ષાનું ‘સફારી’ ચલાવી શક્યો તે ઘણા અંશે મારા પુત્ર ચિ. હર્ષલ પુષ્કર્ણાને આભારી છે, જેણે ત્રીજી પેઢીએ દાદાનો વારસો જાળવ્યો છે. ‘સફારી’માં લેખનથી માંડીને વહીવટ સુધીની બાબતોનો ઘણોખરો કાર્યભાર તેણે સંભાળી લીધો. આજથી ૬૫ વર્ષ પહેલાં સરસ્વતીનો વાસ ધરાવતા ઘરમાં મારો જન્મ થયો તે મારા જીવનની પ્રથમ ઘટના હતી અને બીજી એટલી જ સુખદ ઘટના એ કે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યના બૌધિક અને નૈતિક સંસ્કારો સાથે ચિ. હર્ષલ મારા ઘરે જન્મયો, જ્યાં પણ માતા સરસ્વતીનો વાસ હતો--અને છે.વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય દ્વારા ગુજરાતની પ્રજાને તેમજ મારા પરિવારને મળેલા વારસાની આજે તેમની જન્મશતાબ્દિ નિમિત્તે આપ સૌએ કદર કરી આજનો પ્રસંગ યોજ્યો એને હું મારા જીવનની ત્રીજી સુખદ ઘટના તરીકે યાદ રાખીશ અને જીવું છું ત્યાં સુધી આપ સૌની કદરદાનીનું ઋણ મારા શિરે રહેશે. ધન્યવાદવંદેમાતરમ્
મૂળ વતનની ભૂમિ પર ઘણા વખતે ફરી પગ મૂક્યાનો જે સહજ આનંદ દરેક વ્યક્તિને હોય તે આજે હું પણ અનુભવી રહ્યો છું. વધુ પ્રબળ લાગણી જો કે પોરબંદર મારૂં મૂળ વતન હોવા બદલના તેમજ આપના જેવા સાહિત્યપ્રેમી અને જાગૃત પોરબંદરનિવાસીઓ પ્રત્યેના ગૌરવની છે. આજનો કાર્યક્રમ આયોજિત કરી આપ સૌએ મને અહીં હાજર રહેવાનો જે સુખદ મોકો આપ્યો છે તે હજી ટૂંક સમય પહેલાં મારી કલ્પના બહારનો હતો. મારા સદ્ગત પિતાજી વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યની જન્મશતાબ્દિના વર્ષે તેમની જન્મભૂમિ પર આટલી સહૃદયતા અને સ્નેહપૂર્વક તેમને યાદ કરાય એવી મને સ્વપ્નેય ધારણા ન હતી, કેમ કે સમયનું વહેણ જૂની સ્મૃત્તિઓને નિરંતર ઝાંખી પાડી અંતે ભુલાવી દેતું હોય છે.એક પેઢી બદલાઇ ચૂકી છે. આથી વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યની જન્મશતાબ્દિ મનાવવા માટે મારે શું કરવું તે મૂંઝવનારી સમસ્યા હતી. પ્રશ્ન એ થયો કે આજે કેટલા લોકો જાણતા હોય કે આજથી બરાબર ૧૦૦ વર્ષ પહેલાં પોરબંદરની ધરતી પર વિજયશંકર મુરારજી વાસુના નામે એક ભેખધારી વ્યક્તિ જન્મી હતી, જેણે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય એવું ઉપનામ ધારણ કર્યા બાદ સતત અડધી સદી સુધી ગુજરાતની પ્રજા માટે પોતાની રસાળ કલમ દ્વારા અખૂટ જ્ઞાનનો ધોધ વહાવ્યો હતો? આ સ્થિતિમાં જન્મશતાબ્દિ નિમિત્તે જે પણ પ્રવૃત્તિ હાથ ધરૂં તેમાં સૌ પ્રથમ તો વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય એટલે કોણ તેનો પરિચયાત્મક ખુલાસો મારે આપવો પડે, જે મને તેમની અનોખી સાહિત્યિક, સમાજલક્ષી અને સમૃદ્ધ કારકિર્દી જોતાં વિરોધાભાસ જેવું લાગતું હતું. પરંતુ સમયના વીતવા સાથે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય ભુલાવા માંડ્યા હોય એવી મારી ધારણાને આજના કાર્યક્રમે ભૂલભરેલી ઠરાવી છે--અને તે વાતનો મને આનંદ છે.આજથી સો વર્ષ પહેલાં વીસમી સદીના આરંભે મુરારજી વાસુ નામના જે કંદોઇને ત્યાં મારા પિતાનો જન્મ થયો તેમને આખું પોરબંદર ભોપા મહારાજ તરીકે જાણતું હતું--અને રાજદરબાર સુધી તેમની શાખ હતી. કંદોઇને ત્યાં જન્મેલા પુત્ર વિશે સાધારણ રીતે એવી અપેક્ષા રખાય કે મોટો થયા બાદ તે ખાજલી-પેંડા બનાવે અને પિતાની દુકાન સંભાળી લે. પરંતુ મારા પિતાજીના ભાગ્યમાં મિઠાઇનાં ખોખાં વચ્ચે નહિ, પણ પુસ્તકોનાં થોથાં વચ્ચે જીવવાનું તેમજ મિષ્ટાન્નને બદલે જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનના માહિતીલેખો રાંધવાનું લખાયું હતું. ભણતરનો વિષય કાયદાશાસ્ત્ર ખરો, પરંતુ રસના વિષયો પક્ષીશાસ્ત્રથી માંડીને ભૂસ્તરશાસ્ત્ર અને વનસ્પતિશાસ્ત્ર સુધીના અનેક હતા. પોરબંદરના ખાડીવિસ્તારમાં તેમજ આસપાસના વગડાઉ પ્રદેશમાં ઋતુપ્રવાસી પંખીડાનું નિરીક્ષણ કરવું, લાયબ્રેરીમાં કલાકો વીતાવવા, ‘પ્રકૃત્તિ’ નામના પ્રતિષ્ઠિત સામયિકમાં તેમજ બોમ્બે નેચરલ હિસ્ટરી સોસાયટીના જર્નલમાં પ્રાણી-પંખીઓ વિશે નવી જાણકારી લખવી વગેરે પ્રવૃત્તિઓ તેમના માટે કાયદાના અભ્યાસ કરતાં વિશેષ હતી. જ્ઞાન મેળવવું અને મેળવેલું જ્ઞાન કલમના માધ્યમ દ્વારા બહોળા સમાજને આપવું તે છેવટે તેમની મુખ્ય પ્રવૃત્તિ અને સરવાળે કારકિર્દી બની. વિજયશંકર મુરારજી વાસુને વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યની ભૂમિકા અપાવવામાં આપણા જાણીતા સાહિત્યરત્ન શ્રી ગુલાબદાસ બ્રોકર નિમિત્ત બન્યા. ન્યાયધીશના હોદ્દે પહોંચી ચૂકેલા મારા પિતાજીએ આઝાદીની લડત દરમ્યાન સંજોગવશાત્ પોરબંદર છોડીને મુંબઇમાં માસિક રૂ. ૭૫ના પગારે ટાઇપિસ્ટની નોકરી સ્વીકારવી પડી, જેના વડે કુટુમ્બનું ગુજરાન ચલાવવું મુશ્કેલ હતું. આ વાત મુંબઇમાં જ વસતા શ્રી ગુલાબદાસ બ્રોકરે જાણી ત્યારે તેમણે ‘જન્મભૂમિ’ દૈનિકના તંત્રી મોહનલાલ મહેતા ‘સોપાન’ સાથે મારા પિતાજીની ઓળખાણ કરાવી અને પિતાજીના લેખો છાપવાની ભલામણ કરી. ‘ક્યા વિષય પર લખવાનું ગમે ?’ એવો પ્રશ્ન તંત્રીએ પૂછ્યો ત્યારે પિતાજીએ પક્ષીપરિચયના વિષય પર પસંદગી ઢોળી. તંત્રી સહમત થયા. વારાફરતી અકેક પક્ષીનો અત્યંત રોચક અને રમતિયાળ શૈલીમાં પરિચય આપતા લેખો એટલા લોકભોગ્ય અને લોકપ્રિય નીવડ્યા કે ટૂંક સમય પછી ‘જન્મભૂમિ’ની રવિવારીય પૂર્તિમાં દરેક પક્ષીદીઠ આખું પાનું ફાળવવામાં આવ્યું. માત્ર એક બાબત તંત્રી મોહનલાલ મહેતા ‘સોપાન’ને ખટકતી હતી. પિતાનું નામ વિજયશંકર મુરારજી વાસુ, એટલે લેખક તરીકે તેઓ ટૂંકમાં વિ. મુ. વાસુ લખતા હતા. લેખોની ગુણવત્તા પાસે એ નામ ‘સોપાન’ને ફિક્કું લાગતું હતું. કોઇ પ્રભાવશાળી ઉપનામ અપનાવવાનું તેમણે સૂચવ્યું. વિ. મુ. વાસુ ત્યાર પછી વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય બન્યા, જેમાં વિજય તેમનું અસલ નામ હતું અને મારા દાદાના મુરારજી નામનું તેમણે મૌર્ય કરી નાખ્યું. વિજયની પાછળ ગુપ્ત એવો પ્રત્યય લાગવો તો સ્વાભાવિક હતો. ‘જન્મભૂમિ’ની રવિવારીય પૂર્તિ પ્રવાસીનો સંપૂર્ણ ચાર્જ સોંપાયા પછી તેમણે પંડિત કૌશિક શર્મા, હિમાચલ, મુક્તાનંદ વિશ્વયાત્રી વગેરે નવાં ઉપનામો ધારણ કર્યાં. પૂર્તિનો સૌથી લોકપ્રિય વિભાગ હોય તો ‘છેલ્લું પાનું’, જેણે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય નામ લોકજીભે રમતું કરી દીધું. મુંબઇમાં મારા વસવાટ દરમ્યાન મેં એવાં ઘર જોયાં છે કે જ્યાં રવિવારે ‘જન્મભૂમિપ્રવાસી’ની બબ્બે નકલો મંગાવવામાં આવતી હતી-જેથી ‘છેલ્લું પાનું’ પહેલાં વાંચવા માટે કુટુમ્બનાં સભ્યો વચ્ચે ગજગ્રાહ થાય નહિ. વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યને ગુજરાતભરમાં આવી જ લોકચાહના ‘અખંડ આનંદ’ માસિકમાં આપતી તેમની સવાલ-જવાબની કટાર ‘જ્ઞાનગોષ્ઠિ’એ અપાવી. મને યાદ છે કે એક વાર ઓપરેશન માટે હોસ્પિટલમાં તેમણે અઠવાડિયું રોકાવાનું થયું અને એક અંક પૂરતી ‘જ્ઞાનગોષ્ઠિ’ની કોલમ લખવાની અસમર્થતા તેમણે દર્શાવી ત્યારે અખંડ આનંદ ટ્રસ્ટના મુખ્ય ટ્રસ્ટી મનુ સુબેદારે મેગેઝિનનું પ્રકાશન દસ દિવસ માટે અટકાવ્યું હતું. ‘અખંડ આનંદ’નો અંક ‘જ્ઞાનગોષ્ઠિ’ વિભાગ વગરનો પ્રસિદ્ધ થાય એ મનુ સુબેદારને માન્ય ન હતું, કારણ કે વાચકો એ વિભાગની ખોટ ચલાવી ન લે એવી તેમને ખાતરી હતી.જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનના અનેક વિષયોને વાચકો માટે રસપ્રદ બનાવી જાણતા મારા પિતાને જે મામૂલી આર્થિક મળતર મળતું તે મને પહેલેથી કઠતું રહ્યું હતું. પુરસ્કારની રકમ વધારવા માટે તેઓ ક્યારેય માગણી ન કરતા તે પણ મને ગમતું નહિ. આ બાબત અંગે ક્યારેક હું બળાપો કરૂં ત્યારે તેમનો જવાબ એ હોય કે, ‘મારા થકી વાચકોને જ્ઞાન મળે છે એ જ મારો પુરસ્કાર છે.’આ વાક્ય શરૂ શરૂમાં તો મને જચતું નહિ, પણ જાણ્યેઅજાણ્યે છેવટે તે મારૂં જીવનસૂત્ર બન્યું. ‘સ્કોપ’ અને ‘સફારી’ જેવાં જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનનાં સામયિકો હું પ્રકાશિત કરી શક્યો હોય તો એ મારા પિતાની ઊચ્ચ વિચારધારાને આભારી છે. આજે ‘સફારી’ ગુજરાતનું બહોળો ફેલાવો ધરાવતું અકેમાત્ર મેગેઝિન છે કે જેમાં એક પણ જાહેરખબર લેવાતી નથી. પહેલા કવરથી છેલ્લા કવર સુધી વાચકો માટે જ્ઞાનવિજ્ઞાનનો ભંડાર જ ખડકેલો હોય છે. ‘સફારી’ની ઓડિયો સી.ડી. પ્રગટ કરાય છે, જે તેમને વિનામૂલ્યે આપવામાં આવે છે. આ બધાનું શ્રેય મારા પિતાજીને જાય છે, છતાં એક વાતની ચોખવટ કરૂં કે પિતાની ઊચ્ચ વિચારધારાને હું જીવનમાં ઊતારી શક્યો અને ઊંચી કક્ષાનું ‘સફારી’ ચલાવી શક્યો તે ઘણા અંશે મારા પુત્ર ચિ. હર્ષલ પુષ્કર્ણાને આભારી છે, જેણે ત્રીજી પેઢીએ દાદાનો વારસો જાળવ્યો છે. ‘સફારી’માં લેખનથી માંડીને વહીવટ સુધીની બાબતોનો ઘણોખરો કાર્યભાર તેણે સંભાળી લીધો. આજથી ૬૫ વર્ષ પહેલાં સરસ્વતીનો વાસ ધરાવતા ઘરમાં મારો જન્મ થયો તે મારા જીવનની પ્રથમ ઘટના હતી અને બીજી એટલી જ સુખદ ઘટના એ કે વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્યના બૌધિક અને નૈતિક સંસ્કારો સાથે ચિ. હર્ષલ મારા ઘરે જન્મયો, જ્યાં પણ માતા સરસ્વતીનો વાસ હતો--અને છે.વિજયગુપ્ત મૌર્ય દ્વારા ગુજરાતની પ્રજાને તેમજ મારા પરિવારને મળેલા વારસાની આજે તેમની જન્મશતાબ્દિ નિમિત્તે આપ સૌએ કદર કરી આજનો પ્રસંગ યોજ્યો એને હું મારા જીવનની ત્રીજી સુખદ ઘટના તરીકે યાદ રાખીશ અને જીવું છું ત્યાં સુધી આપ સૌની કદરદાનીનું ઋણ મારા શિરે રહેશે. ધન્યવાદવંદેમાતરમ્
Both articles by -Harshal Pushkarna (Mr. Vasu's grand son)
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Note: He was my favorite writer during my childhood and early youth. I even wrote about one of his books (kapi na parakramo) as my favorite one in my s.s.c. (high school) examination Gujarati language paper. Vijaygupta Maurya's importance can not be realized by the new generation in the Google age when all questions could be answered by the search engine giant. But compare Vijaygupta to Google and his importance could be paralleled- Gujarati readers used to get answers to all their questions by asking Vijaygupta in his feature called "Gnan Goshti" in the Gujarati magazine "Akhand Anand". He was a "living Google" then - I am talking about 1960s when I was his fan. I think he coined his pen name after the great emperor Chandragupta Maurya. -spiritualpanther
An Interview
Public NoticeInternational Contemporary Art is to a large extent an attempt at grasping in visual language the changes---and related social, cultural and sometimes political contradictions---that are appearing the world over, in localized settings. India, along with China as one of the world’s fastest globalizing presence, is home to a vibrant art scene, which observers like to classify as typically “Indian” – in line both with India previous “exotic” image, and with today’s postmodern criticism of “universalism”.
One of the young stars of Indian contemporary painting is Jitish Kallat (b.1974). His short career has seen him cover a wide range of mediums and themes, which focus on the inextricable complexity of modern urban India. Jitish Kallat was until a few years ago primarily known as a painter of huge, billboard-like canvases. His often garish palette used symbolic images drawn from the Indian world around him---TV channels, newspapers, popular imagery—to address haunting and often political subjects such as ethnic violence, intolerance, urban ecology , which are of universal concerns but in his works deeply rooted in the land of India. Since 2003 he makes tri-dimensional works of simile bones, monstrous antediluvian creatures of modernity (cars) that symbolize the “primitive” call of death that seems to hang about the sub-continent’s recurrent bursts of violence.
Endowed with a sharp wit and a writer in his own right, Jittish Kallat (JK) is, as shown in his answers below, the best exponent of his works. C-Arts has for the present issue asked him, through a list of questions prepared for that purpose by its chief-editor Eddy Sutriyono (ES), to “position” his art in the spectrum of the international contemporary scene. The result is extremely interesting for what the artist says of his art, but also for the meaningful “misunderstandings” that appear in his answers to Eddy Sutriyono’s questions. Those “misunderstandings” show an artist eager to escape definition, and who is definitely reluctant to be called post-modern. His message is otherwise very simple: artists cannot but talk about their local realities- in his case Mumbai; yet it is absurd to reduce art to the expression of one’s identity. It is the key themes that matter: pain, happiness, anger, violence and compassion. It is in them that true universalism, if any, lies.
ES: Why do Indian contemporary artists often include Indian elements (whether new or old) in their works? Anish Kapoor likes to use colors that remind one of Indian spices (old); Bhakti Ker uses bindi (old), Subodh Gupta shows Indian traditional kitchen utensils or means of transportation (scooters full of people, cars full of stuff on its rooftops crossing flooded streets); while you highlight the life of the city of Mumbai in your works.
JK: I think your question is loaded with a heavy dose of skepticism about local realities and their symbolic potency within the works of artists. While I accept that this globe has gone through a phase of incessant cultural miscegenation, artists find it irrelevant to withhold the percolation of their neighborhood into their art. I was born in Mumbai and have lived here all my life. In many ways, the city street is my university. All the key themes of life get enacted on a Mumbai street; pain, happiness, anger, violence and compassion are all played out in full volume.
These in turn stack up within my art like a palimpsest of colliding signs.
You can not expect that the works made by artists will not reflect their lived reality; just as it equally futile to search exclusively for national signs within works of artist from anywhere.
ES: Are the intended appearances of Indian local color necessary in this era of globalization? Do you reject universalism? Is it part of a strategy to achieve international success?
JK: I do not know what you mean by Indian local color. Is there Indonesian color or Russian color? I don’t mean to trivialize your question but color as such is certainly universal. Of course some colors may have symbolic meaning specific to a place and occasionally they may even have political undertones. Artists are best equipped to exploit their meaning and tease out the many possibilities of interpretation.
ES: You often depict life in the city of Mumbai, is it because you were born there or is there another reason for this?
JK: I was born in Mumbai and have always lived here. I’m not interested in the city per se but when 20 million people hit the street, all the classic themes of life and art are played out in sharp focus. In many ways, my works become a receptacle of that stimuli.
JC Jittish Kallat refuses to limit himself to an ideological approach that would limit his work as an affirmation of “identity” – that of Mumbai. Instead he sees himself as a simple witness of life in a city that happens to be Mumbai.
ES: Many of your past artworks were made using techniques resulting in something that resembled American Pop Art screen print works, however most of your works now are three dimensional installations. What led you to make this change? Are you following the contemporary art trend?
JK: My work between 1995-2001 greatly resembled a weather beaten city-street, the pixilated television screen or the worn out billboard or film hoarding. The paintings were sometimes symbolically scaled to the format of a billboard even as their content varied dramatically. A lot of these pieces were media inspired and a lot of what I do today continues to address the same themes through a wide range of media. Even as I engage with a variety of material, somewhere deep down my practice is very much anchored in painting.
ES: What is your point of view on contemporary art or postmodernism?
ES: In 2006, you presented two dimensional Indian modern means of transportation on canvas, which were then crushed by a bronze elephant sculpture, frightening creatures like those that appear on the walls of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Why did you decide to position the elephant alongside creatures from western culture / Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris?
JK: I think you are referring to the ‘Rickshawpolis’ series that were almost like vast collision portraits of the thumping, claustrophobic city-streets of Mumbai. However there were no elephants juxtaposed by creatures in any of those works. Within the paintings cars, buses, scooters, cycles, cats, cows and humans collide and coalesce to form mega-explosions. The painting itself is mounted on bronze sculptures, re-creations of gargoyles that are found atop the 120 year old Victoria Terminus Building in the center of Mumbai. The gargoyle, herein symbolizing the figure of the bystander, has been a daily witness to the constant calamity of the street running into itself.
The bronze supports had nothing to do with the Notre Dame. The
architecture of the Victoria Terminus has a family resemblance with cathedrals and other grand buildings in Europe since the Terminus was one of the finest buildings the British built in colonial India. The fact that its corridors are warmed by the transit of millions of people every day makes it is a building loaded with meaning.
ES: Your recent works represent water tank (Aquasaurus), Auto-rickshaw and automobile (Collidonthus) from prehistoric skeletons. Is there any particular concept, notion or philosophy behind these works?
JK: The sculptures of vehicles rendered like prehistoric vertebrates emerged out of studies I began making in 2006-07. These in turn were referenced from my photo-archive of vehicles that have been violated during riots. It is a common sight in South Asia (and perhaps all over the world) to see public fury being externalized by breaking windscreens and setting inanimate automobiles aflame. For instance, when Benazir Bhutto was assassinated recently in Pakistan most televised footage showed angry mobs burning vehicles. The two actions are unrelated and for the same reasons these images have continually caught my attention as I began seeing these vehicles as receptacles of human folly. Even as they perish from being functional objects through these inane acts of ‘cremation’, their charred bodies begin to resemble those of deceased creatures.
Following these initial studies the pieces changed completely from being burnt-umber, fossilized endoskeletons to becoming white, colossal, creepy-cute sculptures that I often describe as ‘grotesque, burlesque and arabesque’ in equal measure. This widens the possibility of engaging with these pieces immensely as the viewer approaches them with sufficient uncertainty. The display of these pieces are many times a cross between a creature in a Natural History Museum, a brand new vehicle in an auto-expo or an oversized toy in a child’s dream.
The first in the series was Autosaurus Tripous a recreation of an auto-rickshaw (referred to as tuk-tuk, auto etc. in other parts of Asia). This omnipresent catalyst of traffic jams definitely seems to have missed its use-by-date in a streetscape that changes every week with the arrival of a new car. Collidonthus was the re-creation of a badly crashed up car I would see parked on the street-side for months on my way to the studio.
Broadly speaking I see these refashioned carcasses carry, albeit in a playful manner, an inscription of death and mortality that refer to recurrent themes in my practice.
ES: In Public Notice, you depicted sentences formed by skeletons. Did you doubt the strength of visualisation, hence you still used a verbal concept? What is the meaning of the skeletons in this particular work? Is it similar to the skeletons in your other works (Aquasaurus, Auto-rickshaw & Collidonthus)? Or is it only a metaphor, just like a chameleon is able to change its colors?
JK: Within my practice, Public Notice-2 (2007) links up with two key antecedents, Public Notice (2003) and Detergent (2004), both works wherein a historical speech is summoned as the central armature of these works. Blurred and sometimes forgotten due to the passage of time, the historical speech is fore-grounded and held up as an apparatus to judge our feats and our follies as nations and as humankind.
Public Notice-2 (2007) re-invokes the momentous speech delivered by Mahatma Gandhi on the eve of the historic 400-kilometer Dandi March lasting almost 24 days during the Indian Freedom Struggle. In today’s terror-infected world, where wars against terror are fought at prime television time, voices such as Gandhi’s can play a crucial role in helping us re-set our ailing world. The entire speech is constructed out of about 4500 re-creations of bones shaped like letters. Each letter in this speech, like a misplaced relic, will hold up the image of violence in clinical clarity even as their collective chorus makes a plea for peace.
I, in no way, discount the power of the visual. Even if Public Notice-2 is a text based piece, it communicates through a very visually captivating experience.
Sunday, July 05, 2009
The Incredible Journey of An Art Work
This is a story of an incredible journey of an artist’s art work, starting from its creation and ending in its accidental destination to an art student’s home. The work was created with much love and care, not to mention much experience, study and research put behind its creation. I painted Mahishasurmardini in mixed-media in 1984 inspired by a Kalighat painting of the same name from Chester & Davida Herwitz Family collection, an image of which was given to me by Mr. Herwitz for reference. Bringing an artwork from the Company School during the British period in India into a contemporary context was a work of admiration for the unknown street artist who originally painted the image of the Goddess Durga as Mahishasurmardini and it was also intended for a social commentary of sort on our time of mundane violence. The result was a stunning image of the Goddess juxtaposed with a photographic water buffalo head superimposed on a shiny granite surface shaped like another buffalo in front of the sword waving Goddess Mahishasurmardini in vivid photographic and water colors combined with crayon and markers. It was bought by Mr. Herwitz right away for his collection of contemporary Indian painting on its completion. The art work remained in the Herwitz collection from the time of its original purchase from me until after Mr. Herwitz passed away.
© Vinod Dave - Mahishasurmardini - Mixed-media - 16X20 inch - 1984 - From Herwitz Family collection - now with Michael Saunders, an art student from New Jersey.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had planned an exhibition of Kalighat painting accompanied by a scholarly book researched and written by Dr. Jyotindra Jain which was also used as the official catalog for the show. Herwitzs had a sizable collection of Kalighat paintings and LACMA wanted to include them in the show. The major portion of works of both the exhibition and the book were from the Herwitz collection. Since the museum had also seen contemporary works in the Herwitz collection, they decided to include some contemporary works that were inspired by Kalight School. Hence, among other works, two of my works were chosen, one of which was Mahishasurmardini that I first painted in 1984 and then belonged to the Herwitz family collection. Another work, titled Thakorjee, was from Bose Pacia Gallery in New York, painted by me in 1998 which also was inspired by a Kalighat painting that was previously shown at the gallery. Thus two of my works from different ownerships were shown along with the traditional Kalighat paintings side by side at the LACMA in 1999. Both the works received impressive press coverage and favorable critique. The show was a popular hit at LACMA and so were my works. This Mahishasurmardini was the first of a series of three unique versions involving the same imagery, but painted differently, in different sizes and at different times between 1984 and 2003.
Mr. Herwitz often worried about the fate of his collection. He used to worry about what will happen to it after his death. He first tried to leave the collection to corporate India, which at that time was not interested. Indian museums were, during the late 1980s and early1990s, unsuitable because of the then quality of their storage facilities and their terms of exhibition He had no confidence in anyone who would inherit his pictorial estate. He often talked to me about this. For that reason he was planning to build a living museum to house his collection, first in Ahmedabad city in India and then, by changing his mind due to the religious fundamentalists’ attack on the gallery he endowed to build in that city, in Massachusetts where he had his business and residence. One thing he abhorred most was the idea of anyone selling his collection to or via a commercial gallery anywhere. He had already raised sizable funds for building a museum through auctions of a small portion of his estate. Additionally, he was loaning good amount of his collection to museums for exhibitions in order to create awareness for then not too well known contemporary Indian art in the United States. And the LACMA show was one of them.
Ironically, Mr. Herwitz died in a car crash during the LACMA show and his dream of building a museum remained unrealized. However, he managed to gift a portion of his collection to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts before his demise. But his fear became reality in a bigger way than he would have ever imagined after his death. About a year later, the major portion of his collection was sold to private buyers including an art gallery. The LACMA show was over and, afterwards, my Mahishasurmardini went back to the Herwitz estate and ended up being sold to the gallery that bought a sizable chunk of the Herwitz collection from the one son to whom they had left any artwork, Thomas, who seems to have had little interest in the collection apart from its cash value promptly unloaded his inheritance for cash. A repetition of the irony was that the owners of that gallery asked me first for contact information of Chester Herwitz’s surviving family who inherited his estate. This was by the time several months after Mrs. Herwitz had passed away. I had no idea why the son’s contact info from me was sought when it was sought, but soon I found out that hundreds of art works from the Herwitz collection were sold to this gallery by Thomas. I personally had been a witness to Mr. Herwitz’s fear of such an event, and I was saddened to know that it actually happened. Daniel, the son who had been deeply involved in the collection as writer and advisor, was disinherited by the mercurial Mr. Herwitz.
Daniel Herwitz, the son who was disinherited from Herwitz Collection estate, is a professor and head of history of art, art & design, and philosophy at the University of Michigan Affiliation(s) Comparative Literature, Institute for the Humanities, Philosophy and Art & Design. Daniel kindly and enthusiastically helped edit this article.
Front and back photographs that Michael Saunders took of Mahishasurmardini with a cell phone and emailed to me for verification.
Thakorjee, another work of mine created after a Kalighat image in 1998 from Bose Pacia Gallery that was shown at LACMA as part of the Kalighat Painting show in 1999.
One more thing that I almost forgot: Gujarati writer/poet Preety Sengupta has used the same image of my first Mahishasurmardini as an image on the cover of her book titled Aparajita - meaning one that can not be defeated (obviously that has to be a Goddess like Durga/Mahishasurmardini) which was published in 2007.
Michael Saunders, an art student from New Jersy, who found Mahishasurmardini on a Brooklyn street.
© Vinod Dave - Mahishasurmardini - Mixed-media - 16X20 inch - 1984 - From Herwitz Family collection - now with Michael Saunders, an art student from New Jersey.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art had planned an exhibition of Kalighat painting accompanied by a scholarly book researched and written by Dr. Jyotindra Jain which was also used as the official catalog for the show. Herwitzs had a sizable collection of Kalighat paintings and LACMA wanted to include them in the show. The major portion of works of both the exhibition and the book were from the Herwitz collection. Since the museum had also seen contemporary works in the Herwitz collection, they decided to include some contemporary works that were inspired by Kalight School. Hence, among other works, two of my works were chosen, one of which was Mahishasurmardini that I first painted in 1984 and then belonged to the Herwitz family collection. Another work, titled Thakorjee, was from Bose Pacia Gallery in New York, painted by me in 1998 which also was inspired by a Kalighat painting that was previously shown at the gallery. Thus two of my works from different ownerships were shown along with the traditional Kalighat paintings side by side at the LACMA in 1999. Both the works received impressive press coverage and favorable critique. The show was a popular hit at LACMA and so were my works. This Mahishasurmardini was the first of a series of three unique versions involving the same imagery, but painted differently, in different sizes and at different times between 1984 and 2003.
Mr. Herwitz often worried about the fate of his collection. He used to worry about what will happen to it after his death. He first tried to leave the collection to corporate India, which at that time was not interested. Indian museums were, during the late 1980s and early1990s, unsuitable because of the then quality of their storage facilities and their terms of exhibition He had no confidence in anyone who would inherit his pictorial estate. He often talked to me about this. For that reason he was planning to build a living museum to house his collection, first in Ahmedabad city in India and then, by changing his mind due to the religious fundamentalists’ attack on the gallery he endowed to build in that city, in Massachusetts where he had his business and residence. One thing he abhorred most was the idea of anyone selling his collection to or via a commercial gallery anywhere. He had already raised sizable funds for building a museum through auctions of a small portion of his estate. Additionally, he was loaning good amount of his collection to museums for exhibitions in order to create awareness for then not too well known contemporary Indian art in the United States. And the LACMA show was one of them.
Ironically, Mr. Herwitz died in a car crash during the LACMA show and his dream of building a museum remained unrealized. However, he managed to gift a portion of his collection to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts before his demise. But his fear became reality in a bigger way than he would have ever imagined after his death. About a year later, the major portion of his collection was sold to private buyers including an art gallery. The LACMA show was over and, afterwards, my Mahishasurmardini went back to the Herwitz estate and ended up being sold to the gallery that bought a sizable chunk of the Herwitz collection from the one son to whom they had left any artwork, Thomas, who seems to have had little interest in the collection apart from its cash value promptly unloaded his inheritance for cash. A repetition of the irony was that the owners of that gallery asked me first for contact information of Chester Herwitz’s surviving family who inherited his estate. This was by the time several months after Mrs. Herwitz had passed away. I had no idea why the son’s contact info from me was sought when it was sought, but soon I found out that hundreds of art works from the Herwitz collection were sold to this gallery by Thomas. I personally had been a witness to Mr. Herwitz’s fear of such an event, and I was saddened to know that it actually happened. Daniel, the son who had been deeply involved in the collection as writer and advisor, was disinherited by the mercurial Mr. Herwitz.
Daniel Herwitz, the son who was disinherited from Herwitz Collection estate, is a professor and head of history of art, art & design, and philosophy at the University of Michigan Affiliation(s) Comparative Literature, Institute for the Humanities, Philosophy and Art & Design. Daniel kindly and enthusiastically helped edit this article.Not only this had happened, but also so many of my works were part of this sale including my Kalighat painting inspired Mahishasurmardini. MY works remained with the gallery for about eight years during which some were sold, some were given to charities and some works remained with the gallery unsold. My Mahishasurmardini was among the works that remained unsold.. Eventually, the gallery moved to another location and the gallery’s inventory had to be moved from their storage warehouse to their new location. Many things were given away including some art works that were difficult to sell and many things like frames were discarded in order to ease the difficult task of moving. I was offered back some works of mine that were hard to sell and I readily accepted them back. I got back many canvases, but I had seen many of my works on paper in their storage warehouse four years back that did not come back to me. So I inquired about what had happened to them and I was told there were no paper works of mine left with them. So I assumed, may be they were sold over these four years since I had seen them.
That seemed to be the end of the story only until I heard from a stranger via Facebook. An art student named Michel Saunders connected me on Facebook around few days before May 14, 2009. And after I confirmed him as a Facebook friend, he sent me an email with two attachments that were cell phone photos of front and back of my Mahishasurmardini. The Back had my name, title of the work, inventory number etc. The front was obviously the image of the art work. Michael Saunders happens to be the new owner of my Mahishasurmardini.
That seemed to be the end of the story only until I heard from a stranger via Facebook. An art student named Michel Saunders connected me on Facebook around few days before May 14, 2009. And after I confirmed him as a Facebook friend, he sent me an email with two attachments that were cell phone photos of front and back of my Mahishasurmardini. The Back had my name, title of the work, inventory number etc. The front was obviously the image of the art work. Michael Saunders happens to be the new owner of my Mahishasurmardini.
Now I am copying and pasting some emails that I and Michael exchanged.
The first email read:
“Mr. Vinod Dave,
I have a copy of your piece "Mahishasuramardini" and was wondering if you would give me some information on the piece. It is absolutely wonderful and I have it hanging above my bed. The piece I have is a print but it has been painted on with some pinkish brushstrokes and perhaps a blue paint marker (?). I was curious about the number of prints made and if the piece I have is an original. I have attached two pictures with the email. One is of the identification sticker on the back and one is of the actual piece. Please forgive me for the poor quality of the pictures and they are reversed. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME!!
Greatest Thanks!
Michael Saunders
Surprised by this, I wrote back:
“hi, michael:
thanks for email. what a surprise to see this work ending up with you. how did you get it? i originally sold it to chester herwitz, a collector of indian art from worcester, ma. after his death, part of his estate ended up with ----- gallery (formerly --- ----- gallery). did you buy it from there? it is a unique painted photograph. it has two more versions, but they are all individually painted. so there is no edition of this work. the image is similar in all three works, but they are all painted separately, hence, no exact print edition and all of them vary in size too. the one you have has provenance of being in the chester and davida herwitz trust and it was shown at los angeles county museum of art, along with another work of mine, in 1999 in an exhibition of kalighat paintings from herwitz collection. this work was included in that to show the influence of traditional kalighat art on contemporary works.
nice to know you as a new owner of my work.
best.
vinod”
The first email read:
“Mr. Vinod Dave,
I have a copy of your piece "Mahishasuramardini" and was wondering if you would give me some information on the piece. It is absolutely wonderful and I have it hanging above my bed. The piece I have is a print but it has been painted on with some pinkish brushstrokes and perhaps a blue paint marker (?). I was curious about the number of prints made and if the piece I have is an original. I have attached two pictures with the email. One is of the identification sticker on the back and one is of the actual piece. Please forgive me for the poor quality of the pictures and they are reversed. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TIME!!
Greatest Thanks!
Michael Saunders
Surprised by this, I wrote back:
“hi, michael:
thanks for email. what a surprise to see this work ending up with you. how did you get it? i originally sold it to chester herwitz, a collector of indian art from worcester, ma. after his death, part of his estate ended up with ----- gallery (formerly --- ----- gallery). did you buy it from there? it is a unique painted photograph. it has two more versions, but they are all individually painted. so there is no edition of this work. the image is similar in all three works, but they are all painted separately, hence, no exact print edition and all of them vary in size too. the one you have has provenance of being in the chester and davida herwitz trust and it was shown at los angeles county museum of art, along with another work of mine, in 1999 in an exhibition of kalighat paintings from herwitz collection. this work was included in that to show the influence of traditional kalighat art on contemporary works.
nice to know you as a new owner of my work.
best.
vinod”
Front and back photographs that Michael Saunders took of Mahishasurmardini with a cell phone and emailed to me for verification.Then we had an exchange of a couple of more emails as following:
Michael to me:
“Mr. Vinod Dave,
I am very honored to own an original piece of yours! It is wonderful and very exciting to hear it is one of a kind. I am an art student in New Jersey studying right now. I love your work and subject matter. My work has a lot to do with metaphysics and the spirituality of existence. It is very inspiring to have your work with me.
To be very honest with you, I stumbled upon your work in the doorway of a Brooklyn apartment. As my friend and I were leaving a studio of a band that my friend was making an album cover for, we noticed a number of large frames at the doorway next to some bags of garbage. We couldn't pass up free frames so I grabbed two and he grabbed two. We ended up lugging them all the way back to his apartment in Jersey City. One of the frames I grabbed had your piece. I researched the information on the back of the frame and discovered you and your work.
As an artist, I am extremely picky of the artists I feel have relevance and are truly thinkers. I truly respect you as an artist and thank you for taking the time to inform me of this piece.
THANK YOU
Michael Saunders”
Then my last email to him:
“wow, michael:
what a story of this work's "journey". mr. herwitz would have never preferred to part with my work, but it was sold after his death. i am glad finally it ended up with someone like you who really likes it as much as mr. herwitz did.
cheers.
vinod”
Michael to me:
“Mr. Vinod Dave,
I am very honored to own an original piece of yours! It is wonderful and very exciting to hear it is one of a kind. I am an art student in New Jersey studying right now. I love your work and subject matter. My work has a lot to do with metaphysics and the spirituality of existence. It is very inspiring to have your work with me.
To be very honest with you, I stumbled upon your work in the doorway of a Brooklyn apartment. As my friend and I were leaving a studio of a band that my friend was making an album cover for, we noticed a number of large frames at the doorway next to some bags of garbage. We couldn't pass up free frames so I grabbed two and he grabbed two. We ended up lugging them all the way back to his apartment in Jersey City. One of the frames I grabbed had your piece. I researched the information on the back of the frame and discovered you and your work.
As an artist, I am extremely picky of the artists I feel have relevance and are truly thinkers. I truly respect you as an artist and thank you for taking the time to inform me of this piece.
THANK YOU
Michael Saunders”
Then my last email to him:
“wow, michael:
what a story of this work's "journey". mr. herwitz would have never preferred to part with my work, but it was sold after his death. i am glad finally it ended up with someone like you who really likes it as much as mr. herwitz did.
cheers.
vinod”
Thakorjee, another work of mine created after a Kalighat image in 1998 from Bose Pacia Gallery that was shown at LACMA as part of the Kalighat Painting show in 1999.Mahishasurmardini was created in a studio in the Westbeth Artists’ Community in New York City in 1984 (when I was living in Westbeth as a fellow of Asian Cultural Council). Then it went to Worcester, Massachusetts to be part of the Herwitz collection the same year. It was shown to many curators from various museums, artists and scholars till 1999 by the Herwitz family. In the same process, it was shown to Dr. Pratapaditya Pal in mid 1990s when Dr, Pal was a major presence in the LACMA staff. As a result, Mahishasurmardini went onto the prestigious walls of LACMA during the Kalight painting exhibition. It was still there when Mr. Herwitz passed away. After the show, it went back to Worcester somewhere in a warehouse where Herwitz’s family stored his collection. Sometime after the year 2001, after 9/11, Mahishasurmardini traveled back to Manhattan where it was originally created in 1984, but this time to an art gallery and not my studio. It stayed there for eight years, most of the time in their storage warehouse, till the gallery moved at the end of the year 2008.
The story of the incredible journey of provenance of Mahishasurmardini from 1984 till 2008, nearly for a quarter of a century, was well documented. That is what I described so far. But by mid 2009, there are some links missing and mysteries unsolved. Where was it from December 2008 till May 2009? Who had it before Michel found it near a dumpster? How did it travel to Brooklyn from Manhattan? Did someone find it on a Manhattan sidewalk dumpster and take it to Brooklyn only to dump it again? Or did someone buy it, took it to Brooklyn, and later lost interest in it and dumped it? Did the gallery also have a storage space in Brooklyn near where it was found by Michael? Or it was given away to someone who later discarded it? Was it originally thrown away by the gallery who owned it during their move? Was it taken by an employee from the gallery? Was it dumped by mistake or was it because it was thought to be worthless? These questions do not have answers, but any answer to any of these questions has one fact in common: whoever did whatever to this art work did not know its provenance, hence, he/she did not know its historical value. Its artistic value could be a matter of not knowing art from trash. What could be art is a liquid debate and can not be proved mathematically. But its historical value, if known, could be even calculated mathematically because an art work’s prestigious provenance increases not only its importance, but also its price tag. Obviously, no one behind Mahishasurmardini’s recent dumpster-to-dumpster ordeal knew the history of its provenance. Otherwise, who would let go something of value?
Notes:
The art gallery’s name is intentionally omitted as it is not my purpose in writing this article to blame anyone. Everything that happened may have been an error. I am writing this only to show how interesting story of even an inanimate object could be in its journey. Similar events have happened in the history. A Jackson Pollock work too was once found in a sidewalk dumpster. One work of Francis Newton Souza’s works was found on a Manhattan street by someone who auctioned it at Sotheby’s only for $3000 just before Souza died and his prices sky-rocketed to millions just a year later! And a friend in Westbeth Artists Housing last year found a Jean Michel Basquiat from a SoHo street (its authenticity is yet to be verified). Hey I am not in these artists’ league, but I have done good works and bad works and Mahishasurmardini is one of my many good works. And it has an impressive provenance. The point is: the stories of art works, though often sad, could be dramatically interesting. That is the sole purpose of writing this story.
My special thanks to Prof. Daniel Herwitz who kindly and enthusiastically helped in editing and making suggestions for this story. He wrote to me while sending me the edited draft:
” Amazingly I did it just now and was about to write you just at this moment. This is kismet, a lunar unity of two minds! The story is one I did not know and it pains me extraordinarily to read it. I’ve added some details to your extremely well written blog which you can accept or reject, using TRACK CHANGES. I send it to you now. This is a totally awful story and I’m totally appalled.
Yours Daniel”
When asked if I could include his reactions in the story, he wrote back: Tell them I am appalled and horrified. Best and so very sorry. - Danny
Stop Press:
This just in: The last version of this Mahishasurmardini which was created in the year 2003 has been selected by the Department of State for the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India and their mouthpiece Span magazine for upcoming 2010 calendar soon to be published and distributed nationwide in India. In one way or another, this art work’s provenance still continues to be more and more noteworthy.
The story of the incredible journey of provenance of Mahishasurmardini from 1984 till 2008, nearly for a quarter of a century, was well documented. That is what I described so far. But by mid 2009, there are some links missing and mysteries unsolved. Where was it from December 2008 till May 2009? Who had it before Michel found it near a dumpster? How did it travel to Brooklyn from Manhattan? Did someone find it on a Manhattan sidewalk dumpster and take it to Brooklyn only to dump it again? Or did someone buy it, took it to Brooklyn, and later lost interest in it and dumped it? Did the gallery also have a storage space in Brooklyn near where it was found by Michael? Or it was given away to someone who later discarded it? Was it originally thrown away by the gallery who owned it during their move? Was it taken by an employee from the gallery? Was it dumped by mistake or was it because it was thought to be worthless? These questions do not have answers, but any answer to any of these questions has one fact in common: whoever did whatever to this art work did not know its provenance, hence, he/she did not know its historical value. Its artistic value could be a matter of not knowing art from trash. What could be art is a liquid debate and can not be proved mathematically. But its historical value, if known, could be even calculated mathematically because an art work’s prestigious provenance increases not only its importance, but also its price tag. Obviously, no one behind Mahishasurmardini’s recent dumpster-to-dumpster ordeal knew the history of its provenance. Otherwise, who would let go something of value?
Notes:
The art gallery’s name is intentionally omitted as it is not my purpose in writing this article to blame anyone. Everything that happened may have been an error. I am writing this only to show how interesting story of even an inanimate object could be in its journey. Similar events have happened in the history. A Jackson Pollock work too was once found in a sidewalk dumpster. One work of Francis Newton Souza’s works was found on a Manhattan street by someone who auctioned it at Sotheby’s only for $3000 just before Souza died and his prices sky-rocketed to millions just a year later! And a friend in Westbeth Artists Housing last year found a Jean Michel Basquiat from a SoHo street (its authenticity is yet to be verified). Hey I am not in these artists’ league, but I have done good works and bad works and Mahishasurmardini is one of my many good works. And it has an impressive provenance. The point is: the stories of art works, though often sad, could be dramatically interesting. That is the sole purpose of writing this story.
My special thanks to Prof. Daniel Herwitz who kindly and enthusiastically helped in editing and making suggestions for this story. He wrote to me while sending me the edited draft:
” Amazingly I did it just now and was about to write you just at this moment. This is kismet, a lunar unity of two minds! The story is one I did not know and it pains me extraordinarily to read it. I’ve added some details to your extremely well written blog which you can accept or reject, using TRACK CHANGES. I send it to you now. This is a totally awful story and I’m totally appalled.
Yours Daniel”
When asked if I could include his reactions in the story, he wrote back: Tell them I am appalled and horrified. Best and so very sorry. - Danny
Stop Press:
This just in: The last version of this Mahishasurmardini which was created in the year 2003 has been selected by the Department of State for the United States Embassy in New Delhi, India and their mouthpiece Span magazine for upcoming 2010 calendar soon to be published and distributed nationwide in India. In one way or another, this art work’s provenance still continues to be more and more noteworthy.
One more thing that I almost forgot: Gujarati writer/poet Preety Sengupta has used the same image of my first Mahishasurmardini as an image on the cover of her book titled Aparajita - meaning one that can not be defeated (obviously that has to be a Goddess like Durga/Mahishasurmardini) which was published in 2007.
Michael Saunders, an art student from New Jersy, who found Mahishasurmardini on a Brooklyn street. -Vinod Dave
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Quentin Morris
Philadelphia based artist Quentin Morris' work is as minimal as something not to be associated with words, not even titles.
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Friday, March 06, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Seven Ways of the Song
Variants of Gayatri Mantra chanting on Youtube: Some has great combination of music, chant and visuals. Others, while lacking in visual imagination, still capture the psyche with eyes closed. Each one has its own character. There are more worthy of listening versions among endless number of trashy videos on YouTube than just what is embedded here.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
ઉર્ફે
માણસ ઉર્ફે રેતી, ઉર્ફે દરિયો, ઉર્ફે ડૂબી જવાની ઘટના ઉર્ફે,
ઘટના એટલે લોહી, એટલે વહેવું એટલે ખૂટી જવાની ઘટના ઉર્ફે…
ખુલ્લી બારી જેવી આંખો ને આંખોમાં દિવસો ઊગે ને આથમતા;દિવસો
મતલબ વેઢા, મતલબ પંખી, મતલબ ઊડી જવાની ઘટના ઉર્ફે…
વજ્જરની છાતી ના પીગળે, આંસું જેવું પાંપણને કૈંક અડકે તો પણ;આંસુ,
એમાં શૈશવ, એમાં કૂવો, એમાં કૂદી જવાની ઘટના ઉર્ફે…
પગમાંથી પગલું ફૂટે ને પગલાંમાંથી રસ્તાના કૈં રસ્તા ફૂટે;
રસ્તા અથવા ફૂલો અથવા પથ્થર અથવા ઊગી જવાની ઘટના ઉર્ફે…
ચાલો સૌ આ સંબંધોની વણજારોને બીજે રસ્તે વાળી દઈએ,
સંબંધો સમણાંનાં ઝુમ્મર, ઝુમ્મર યાને ફૂટી જવાની ઘટના ઉર્ફે…
છાતીમાં સૂરજ ઊગ્યાનો દવ સળગે ને સૂરજ તો એક પીળું ગૂમડું,
ગૂમડું પાકે, છાતી પાકે, મહેફિલમાંથી ઊઠી જવાની ઘટના ઉર્ફે…
મૂઠી ભરીને પડછાયાનાં ગામ વસેલાં ને પડછાયા હાલે ચાલે,
પડછાયા તો જાણે ચહેરા, ચહેરા જાણે ભૂલી જવાની ઘટના ઉર્ફે…
- નયન દેસાઈ
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