Telescoping the Percept / The perseverance of artistic habits – On Sujith SN’s ‘Map is not Territory’

Art critic and curator Kavitha Balakrishnan examines the ways of the artist’s eye based on the young contemporary artist Sujith S.N’s work, ‘Map is not Territory.’

‘I saw myself seeing myself: I warm myself warming myself’

There are many ways for expressing one’s eye for the world, like looking, watching, observing, gazing, capturing, appearing, vanishing or blurring. In painting, each such act of the eye brings in ‘a percept,’ a mental product of social political historical and personal perceiving. So the ways of the eyes are artistic reservoirs for any space and time to make sense of a present. But perceptual languages in the disciplines of art, be it real, natural, illusive, impressive, abstract or expressive, have all supposedly reached many a times at an ‘endgame’ situation in 20th Century. ‘In visual theory endgame art is a post-modern condition in which little remains to be done, and yet it is unclear whether the game of art can actually be ended. Endgame artists make minimal moves, trying to finesse the dying mechanisms of art, a few more incremental steps’( 1). Then, ‘ways of the eyes’ seem to exhaust for some of us in the art worlds, perhaps because they are caught at ‘a draw’ that is generally called forth at any ‘endgame’ situation. Or it can hint at the start of a new-game? One can not cook any answer fast because ‘endgame’ in art worlds seems almost as an infinite situation now. But beyond these games of old and new, interestingly one can see in the works of some quite young generation contemporary artists, the ongoing thrust on the wonders of cognition and the perseverance of artistic habits to express their artist-selves. By ‘perseverance of artistic habits,’ I mean the fact that every day, across locations, there is fixed an artist’s eye fresh on a thing, on a frame, on a brush, on a visual, on a memory and perhaps on a dream. Eye’s languages continue to haunt art practices. It blithers further into an ambivalent sensory take on almost everything. And to talk about it here, I locate Sujith SN’s work ‘Map is not Territory.’

May be there are some writer’s reasons for my selecting this particular work to talk. At the end of art history, the ‘historian-tasks’ also face the problem of ‘the present’ when one really tends to make almost telescopic graphs to mark one’s impossibility to produce ‘authentic’ story of art history for all. One’s veritable abstract mapping of art history (including its choices, omissions, accesses, de-linking and discoveries yet to be in place) is an auto-generated setting popping from such difficult sense of camouflage; the boiled and over-cooked histories of past and present, East and West, traditional and the ‘modern.’

Hovering eye gathering objects

Sujith SN, for some years now, exercise his eyes on changing landscapes, the machines and labours that so swiftly escape one’s familiar responses, vigilances and grasps. More than about the things watched, Sujith is well aware of the fact that ‘he is looking,’ so is feeling, and very much so is touching things.

From the art student times he had been producing quite impressive sketches of the crows in the sultry colour schemes or the regiments of mobs and machines as murky designs. There had produced terrains that were quite fluid and never particularly spatial. In those sketchbooks he appeared to be hesitant to give shadows to the scattered objects gathered. They looked as if coming from some strange orders. The charcoal and dry pastels of limited palette added to the mood of a shapeless terrain in the making. The very ‘using’ of the pastel/charcoal stick, the rubbing, the smudging and other things basically involved the everywhere skills of any familiar artist, but there were some particular edges to which Sujith was pushing his activities. That was perhaps about the problem of space, like what really binds these desperately gathered drawings of houses, machines, crows and people. They were scattered on a non-place, (though not ‘vacuum’ of sorts) or they were forming murky messiness. Perhaps it was an ‘artistic practice’ of sorts that Sujith was taking up at those brinks of emoting with one’s own eye’s ways.

Shadows, in other words paranoia

From what could have been lost into a passive observer’s reportage, Sujith enlivened each sketched object with charred subliminal lights and shades. Subliminal in the sense, an object gets its own parabola of existence that is strikingly distinct from the other. The parabolic shadows were simple linguistic cues he developed. It also helped to bring an existence for objects in place in spite of their paranoiac forms. The schemes of representational languages, especially their detailing and dexterity, were strongly resisted thus. No vanishing points. No convergence of things into an illusive space. No flattening of space. No fluted plasticity to simply demonstrate some artistic skills. There were calculated attempts to bring in reasons for each image’s isolation and each shadow that tends to complete in a small place. At the same time the multiplication of such object-spaces was not achieved by mere replication of images but by calculated scaling of things in relation to each other. Only a dedicated viewer could recognise the evanescent brightness that worked up this scaling.

Which is bigger, a crow or an aeroplane?

A castle or a grinding machine?

A map or a piece of spaded soil / land?

One can go on finding such perceptual puzzles from many of his drawings. But these are artist’s humble metaphors that kill our pride at empirical / cultural grasps to determine ideologies of existence like power and surveillance. Sujith’s biography as a draughtsman and later as an art student was impressive not for its achievements at first hand but for its relation to a state of dormant paranoia to which Sujith as a person seemed to be responding quite truthfully.

Experience of war might be distinctive from the fear of war. Experience of dislocation must be different from the fear of mysterious other. Sujith experiences fear and is quite sensitive to it.

But fear is a flight for an artist? One scales fears up and down in sketchbook. The act of the very ‘eye’ !

From a paper or sketchbook or a canvas, things so called as artist’s eyes are generated like birds or aeroplanes or cloudlets. Bird-plane-cloud is but a discreet flight. Simply that, each eye/image drawn is a vision that is in a mission to fly.

At the end of art histories, such an eye gets activated as that refusing to crash-land at a specific language-situation at any cost. So it starts hovering above histories of representation, abstraction and things so called as ‘art languages.’

Non-place of language : blurring objects

The hovering artist starts identifying masters and their shadows. After the quite visualising ‘Culture Vehicle,’ the heap of imagery vanishes. A translucent flood erupts in. One looks at solitary beings running towards. Barking dogs in silence get sunken in the flood of water colour’s staining blobs. It starts locating unidentifiable smokes. Edward Munch or his ‘Scream,’ the Expressionistic masterpiece, had nothing direct to do with the situation except for the expressive co-relations that do not escape the notice of one’s familiar schemes seeing Expressionistic masters of Western Art. The vanishing lines creep in for the first time in Sujith’s scheme with some definitive nature similar to the idea of ‘landscapes.’ As a post- graduate student at Hyderabad, Sujith was then grappling with real new landscape, the global cityscapes and suburbs fast in making with all new construction equipments and labour lives. Nameless machines and strange equipments appeared and disappeared over his window. Machines with pink tips and corrugated hands gathered quite an erotic momentum in the drawings and compositions done in Hyderabad, again gradually losing the vanishing lines.

There is an ongoing new ‘situation of pride’ expressed through skyscrapers that appears and demolishes the old historical or national or generational prides. Buildings and construction sites work as a collective metaphor of loss and gain of societies and cultures, the loss and gain of struggles and access to life and wonder. The labours finally go unnoticed in the glow. Sujith perhaps sketched those labours mysterious for his personal eye, may be for his ‘loss and gain’ or ‘hide and seek’ language of daily work as an artist.

However it quotes monuments among other things of ‘culture’ and the ‘self.’ As an inheritor of artistic habits, he recognised his quotation as the ‘Tower of Babel,’ Peter Bruegel’s masterpiece.

One quotes a master by quoting oneself

The pangs of the artist’s eye turn so intense that it blurs at the blow of a water drop. All these are out of a suspended state of an artist when he is not fully a pilot of his flights, yet can read the signals and locate himself as much as he can do with the oceans deserts soils trees tunnels and tools for no particular pre-destined venture.

Thus one de-territorialises through a suspended cognition. It is but no easy task. One can feel, one can touch, but not a territory. It is too vast to grasp. It is too much a microorganism for a human situation.

So artist looks around and acts by his tools. He has pen paper charcoal water brush and perhaps a camera. But the produces of these equipments remain largely unfinished and they dream timelessness as the backdrop of all familiar timelines. Artist touches paper. He pulls a thread across two different points but it becomes a line of smoke showing the graph of a path taken by his hand. Then what is the use asking him about smoke? He won’t be able to give reason for your idea of smoke.

But he will be able to tell you the struggles one experienced to deal with colours all of a sudden, by no reason, different from his usual charred siennas and ochres.

“ Suddenly colours appeared in my scheme. Earlier entering into my work was almost like getting into a tunnel. Whatever bright thing is carried into the space of my drawing, the effect of the work turned to be darkish. May be I profusely used black because I could suggest or hide many things. Or sometimes I could also escape without addressing a lot of things. But turning to colour means a fair share of things needed to be clear. Escape acts are difficult then. Fresh colours seemed ‘not mine’ at some stages of doing this work. I had discontinued doing this for sometime. But I have certain obsession. That made me work further on it.”

An archetypal being

Sujith’s particular work called ‘Map is not territory’ is perhaps a launching pad midway that clearly develops his troubles with space and re-cognising. He gathers his much loved Colour was a practical problem that he variously handled. This is his shift from the ‘dialectical fairyland’ of man and machines to the more assertive capture of the very act of painting as physicality of existence over the centuries( 2).

So he says: ‘I literally walk over this map....’

As evidenced in the title of the work, there is an inevitable failure that cartographers, nationalists and strategic planners in wars will not but an artist bothers. It is the failure to produce useful meanings. It is the slip into abstraction on the pending discoveries yet to be in place. Pain, power, fear and pride get withheld by this abstraction. Perhaps a Bruegelian drama of life is just suggested in murky washes and smudges. A Magrittian “chemineau” (the vagabond and temporary agricultural labourer) or ‘The Healer’ (the Gouache work of Rene Magritte in 1936) appears on a dark corner with an ochre patch.

An encompassing distance crudely achieved by a flight of an artist with his tools puts one in an archetypal being so called as an ‘artist-poet’.

Footnotes

1. James Elkins, ‘Stories of Art,’ Routledge, London. 2002. Pp. 35-36

2. ‘The dialectical fairyland’; Walter Benjamin started the first phase of his ‘Arcade Project’ with this ‘impermissibly poetic’ title working up notes on Paris Arcades in 1920s. It is now a legend in philosophical thought gathered from the reflective heap of notes Benjamin went on preparing on the most important architectural forms of his time. From the notes, it turned a social and cultural perspective on 19th century Paris. It was modernity’s experiences of world in its own making.

(Kavitha Balakrishnan is a poet, curator and bi-lingual writer on contemporary Indian Art. She holds an M.A. (Fine) Art History from M.S.University, Baroda and her PhD thesis on the practice of magazine illustrations in the context of literate-media sensibility of 20^th Century India. Currently she is the Faculty in Art History at Govt. College of Fine Arts, Thrissur.)