Viewing page 14 of 132
This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.
5 Disciplined emotion Born and educated in Aligarn, Zarina--she insists on using only her first name--had her first one man show in Delhi in 1968. The following year she won the National Award for Graphics. Her work hangs in the collection of the National Akademi, in the Altair of Brussels, in London's Curwen Gallery, Australia's Hemisphere, and in Paris Left Bank in the gallery called La Hune, which has made many a contemporary artist famous. Her movements are slow, her expressive hands emphasize a point with deliberation. Her intensity, restrained as it is, sometimes overflows as she talks of her work, but her voice is never loud. The same quality of disciplined emotion comes through her work. Her eyes thoughtful, she went on to explain that austerity was the predominant quality in her work, a "sparingness" as she put it. "It is part of my process of reflection. I feel that only by rejecting everything unnecessary can I come to the essentials, like the nerves in a structure, which are strung so tautly that the slightest touch can start an explosion. Even in life she feels the necessity for this reduction to the essentials. She sat on the floor, arranging small slivers of thin wood on a sheet of ply, moving them here and there. Last winter I had watched her painstakingly deepening the grooves in a disc cut off a tree trunk, following the intricate pattern of the grain. She had seemed to work by instinct, following the natural design at times, at others changing it by intensifying the depth of engraving. Life an accident "Is your work pre-planned?" I asked her now. "No, when I work I take the whole paper into consideration and place my fragments on it, moving them around until they come to a certain position which I know is right. I do draw and scribble, but the actual work is always different." She smiled, "Since the whole of life is an accident, or chance, this is reflected in my work I feel." "Has the absence of a formal art education influenced your work?" was my next question. Her answer came that she felt this had given her a certain freedom. She had never been tied down to the traditional techniques or material. "For me to break away from all existing tools was easier. I can pick up any tool, any material, and mould it to my own use. At the moment wood fascinates me, wood of all kinds, ply, bark, grained wood. One of the most interesting prints I have made was from a worm-eaten plank!" She added that she doesn't like systematic composition, or creating effects. "I put down something simple and direct." "How do you fit into the contemporary art scene in this country?" I asked. "I am an anti-traditionalist. In India, most of us, the artists included, are handicapped by tradition, and I feel strongly that tradition stops creativity. As I said you mustn't keep looking back——Most of us artists are passing through a stage of being unsure of what we want to do. The artist must find his own ethics: he is someone who must break away, break traditions. You are a creative person and if you are to create, you need your own rules of existence, new ones very often." In her opinion, in India many artists still tend to follow others' modes of behaviour, the West's Bohemian tradition for example, the out-dated [[end of sentence cut off at top of page]] "How can you reject tradition completely?" I argued. "Traditions are a part of every individual. You can reject certain aspects, but how can you repudiate an integral part of yourself? Isn't that the problem the Indian artist faces?" She thought for a moment "Perhaps you can't totally. But you can't keep looking back either, back into mythology and the old symbols, the trident and the serpent, which seem to recur repeatedly in contemporary work. You must reinterpret the symbols in your own image, express your creative impulses through colour and form in your own way. Picasso did it successfully with the Greek owl, with the Greek God Zeus." I remarked that the Indian artist often seemed to revert to tradition, to his "Indian-ness", self-consciously and deliberately, because this is what appealed to a foreign public, and that this created a climate of compromise in the art world. Zarina commented that it was not easy for artists. "Basically everything comes down to economics. We have scarcely any buying public at all. Some Government patronage exists, a few foreigners buy a few Indians. But most of them want names. So the younger generation has little chance." I suggested that perhaps because of these economic realities compromise crept in, also that the older generation of artists felt somewhat insecure and so did not offer much encouragement to those struggling to come up. She was inclined to agree. For the artist to survive he must become a teacher, or start running official Akademies. Then I feel his work suffers. The young struggling artist, who finds it difficult to make ends meet, has to take small bureaucratic jobs, and forcibly becomes a "babu." Or he accepts the patronage of established artists. So much of his life is spent looking after daily needs that either way he loses years of work, and many give up. Personally I feel very sorry that we have not recognised the dignity of labour, for that would help young artists survive and keep working in an uncompromising fashion. State patronage "Today the few who have survived sell largely because of Government patronage, and this often goes to a few people with the right contacts!" The Indian dilemma was my comment. I asked her if she thought that the general climate in the country, the transitional nature of our present society, where old traditions were fast disappearing with more and more people driven by the desire for financial prosperity and political power at the cost of integrity, of loyalty and commitment to certain ethical values, did not affect the artist and encourage the sense of commercialism? "Naturally, the artist is affected by environment" she replied. "We all are. Artists are involved, engage in every expression of life, political developments, poverty and suffering and our helplessness in its face; as an artist you are perhaps more sensitive, more receptive. The test of the artist is how much he can express this in his work. There is a limitation. I find it in my own work and am never satisfied because it never expresses everything I want it to. "But because some artists in Continued on page 8
Transcription Notes:
End of sentence in first column is cut off at top of next column.
