PRESS RELEASE*
Baiju Parthan, Chittrovanu Mazumdar and Shibu Natesan
ALTERED REALITIES
Aicon Gallery, NY
February 24 - March 23, 2006
Opening reception, February 24, 6-9pm
It is a remarkable testament to our media-saturated times, that we find the most amazing alteration of reality – visual, aural and even physically tangible – to be completely unremarkable. If Mahatma Gandhi were to lift an iPod up, hold it toward us with extended arm and urge us to buy the latest 20-gigabyte model in his characteristic nasal voice, we would not be fazed. We would merely assume that Apple had decided to give its very successful still-image campaign some motion and had sought the help of a very talented image-manipulator.
In fact, the good Mahatma is a good example to stay with, for Apple is not the only discoverer of his visual appeal. Telecom Italia, very successfully, mixed metaphor, message and an impressive run-down of the services it provides, in an award-winning commercial which showed Gandhi's message of peace and love, being picked up by a web cam in the ashram and broadcast over a range of devices - both wireless and wired to every corner of the world. Although the commercial did not go so far as to say that World War II did not happen, thanks to Gandhi's message and Telecom Italia's ability to spread it far and wide, it certainly implied that that could well come to pass. After watching the commercial, is very difficult to distinguish whether the successful seduction of the viewer lay in reality or in its alteration.
We live in a world of digital imagery where alterations are uber-realistic, where seductive powers of the visual experience can be multiplied millions of times, across thousands of miles and in all time zones, simultaneously. There is a certain poetic justice, then, that contemporary artists, working with centuries old media of oil and acrylic paint on canvas, have turned their focus on interpreting, regurgitating and eventually altering, these altered realities.
The three artists whose works are in this exhibition – Baiju Parthan, Chittrovanu Mazumdar and Shibu Natesan – come to their art from very different starting points and have traveled very different roads to get there; yet all three of them leverage the viewer's inherent familiarity with the post-MTV landscape, to make their artistic points. Their art, is a product of, as well pre-supposes a media-familiarity, if not sophistication, on our, the viewer's, part.
In this unity of foundation, they are not alone. That is to say, there are other practitioners, who in their own ways leverage the same media-familiarity within the audience, as do Baiju, Chittrovanu and Shibu (one is tempted to say that if only Shibu's name began with the alphabet 'A', newspaper headlines like "The ABC of Indian Art" would not be hard to imagine); however this troika does represent the phenomenon's apex. They find themselves at this apex because they have been, at once, able to seize the zeitgeist and infuse it with their own persona. This essay, after this introduction, continues as a series of conversations between the author and the three artists. Conversations that reveal, in less predictable ways than the reader may imagine, what makes these men tick.
Their ability to seize the zeitgeist is not surprising when we consider that all were born during the years between 1956 and 1966. They are from a generation that was at least a decade distant from colonial rule and they were young men, either still in art school or fresh graduates at the time that India was opening up to the world, after practicing decades of inward-looking economics. The economic liberalization was almost simultaneous with the invasion of popular western culture that bounced into impressionable Indian minds off of satellite dishes. While India was no Iran or North Korea and was never starved of visual stimuli, including more than its fair share of popular (Bollywood) culture which now threatens to reverse-colonize, what could be said accurately about the times that Baiju, Chittrovanu and Shibu grew up in, is that sheer volume of available visual stimuli that they were exposed to as compared to artists ten-fifteen years older than them, just exploded. The visual landscape, starting with their generation, would never be the same again.
Another, often overlooked, thread that ties this threesome together is that they grew up in, and in the case of Chittrovanu and Shibu received their undergraduate art education in, two of India's three regularly communist-ruled states. Their youths coincided with periods of immense political upheaval. Upheaval, which brought the communists to power, in eastern West Bengal and southern Kerala states. The politics of confrontation, the sharp class definitions that went with that politics and a general post-industrial malaise without the information-technology based post-industrial hopefulness of today, probably made their realities so gray that altering it did not seem like a bad idea at all. Again, this was not a world of Gerhard Richter or the Dresden School, set amidst a truly gray circumstances, trying to transcend it through art. That comparison is tempting to make, given the realism inherent in both styles. However, for reasons of technology, if nothing else, it is not an apt comparison. Shibu Natesan said in his conversation with me, "….all of twentieth-century art can be thought of as a intermittent love-hate affair with photography." While the Dresdeners were at the silver bromide end of this love affair, at a time when 'in black and white' meant ultimate truth, our troika find themselves at the pixilated end of the range, where no visual proof is a sacrosanct harbinger of truth.
For more information and visuals, please contact:
Aicon Gallery, 206 5th Avenue, Fifth Floor, between 25th & 26th St.
T: (212) 725-6092; F: (212) 725-6096, newyork@aicongallery.com
www.aicongallery.com