JAIPUR ART SUMMIT: WHERE THE MUNDANE MET THE MASTERS

Yasra Daud khoker

The Jaipur Art Summit left me with some homework. I have to go out on my own, buy groceries and experience an auto rickshaw ride. I shall elaborate on that later, but first, let us contemplate as to what the event brought to Jaipur. For five days, from 7 – 11 November, the Jawahar Kala Kendra and the Hotel Clarks Amer were frequented by two kinds of people- those who understood art and those who understood it too well. The venues were a carnival of exchange of ideas, conversations and a celebration of that primal need of man- to express. The summit began with the Governor of Rajasthan, Ms. Margaret Alva expressing joy at the increasing number of art and literary events in Jaipur. Noted for its rich legacies of art and culture, Rajasthan has some of the finest artists in the country but largely unexposed to the rest of the art world. An endeavor of the Progressive Artists Group (PAG), the Jaipur Art Summit showcased works of over 150 regional artists ensuring no dearth of variety for spectators. Apart from bringing in the who’s who of the art world, these five days created a platform for discussion and allowed viewers to engage with the artists, admitting a dialogue rousing the creative side in many others. Two days of seminars by noted scholars like Abhay Sardesai, Alka Pande, Ashrafi Bhagat, Jai Krishna Agarwal, Johny ML, Mangalesh Dabral, Prayag Shukla and Uma Nair, touching upon a variety of issues, from the influence of the art market on contemporary art to the dilemmas of contemporary visual artists, book launches by KL Verma, Rajesh Kumar Singh and Vinod Bhardwaj, and art demonstrations ranging from ceramics and Sanjhi art to enameling and cinema hoardings- nothing had been overlooked by the organizers and the chairperson of the summit; Timmie Kumar. The Art Camp had an old-world feel which was reminiscent of the ‘café culture’ during the French Revolution where people gathered around tables to inform, exchange ideas, to debate and create a revolution of ideas that eventually led to the storming of the Bastille. It may sound exaggerated but the continual, unending animation of paint against canvas- somewhere a splatter, somewhere a whip- and the resultant synergy radiated throughout the space. It was a fragment of time frozen in sepia-toned time.

Glimpses of the Artist Camp:
Gopi Gajwani, a gentleman artist, created a composition that skipped beyond the two-dimensional flatness of the canvas and performed an act of symphony, of melody, of harmony. He says, “Think of a music conductor who writes a musical score and sets it for an orchestra. Similarly this is a score in color. Colors make noise and arranging them has to be calculative. Nothing is accidental. It is all very carefully worked out. It is like singing a raga and has a very strong grammar.” RB Bhaskaran’s work centered around impermanence, growth, shift and advancement where the vibrancy of the red that carves a positive space for a budding sprout in white, contrasts the darker half, inhabited by a characteristic motif; the fish. An element of conflict features subliminally as the progression is heavily towards the unfamiliar. Manjunath Kamath interpreted the inherent tensions in our daily lives as a play of balance amongst a variety of furniture articles stacked in a rather haphazard bid for survival, to avoid falling perhaps. The various pieces, starkly contrasting against one another, induce visual anxiety as the edges threaten to lose balance and shatter the theatricality of the consciously calibrated chaos, aptly titled “to be continued”. Vinod Sharma painted two large canvases in his peculiar style, illustrating the simplicity and beauty of nature monochromatically, contrasted with a sway of color while Shridhar Iyer arrested the energy flux in the cosmos through dynamic splashes and dribbles of color. K Muralidharan elaborated his mythical story telling to two canvases where animals featuring in stories as ancient as the Panchatantra and the Jataka tales, invite the viewer to search for wonder and magic ‘in the most unlikely places’, as Roald Dahl famously said.

Installations and Art Exhibition:
Chintan Upadhyay’s installation ‘Between times and real’ used cars like the ubiquitous Ambassador and Tata nano as analogies to the changing face of Indian demographics and the shift from a collectivist mode of society to an individualist one. The cars are painted in bright colors and the traditional motifs they flaunt, are exactly that- patterned facades devoid of meaning, a move intended to question identity and its relevance in the culture bubble we live in today. The installation raised many-an-issue but one of the most amusing one came from an elderly woman who inquired if the cars were for sale.