Article in Palmleaf Magazine, London

Dr.Kavitha Balakrishnan is an artist, poet, and art

educator based in Kerala. Trained in Art Historical

studies from M S university Baroda, she writes

bilingually (Malayalam & English) on Art since

1998. She has two books on Art to her credit, both

articulating Kerala in the context of Modern and

contemporary practices. Her area of research

connects media, design and art history through

20th century modern Indian art experience. She

has widely lectured on Art in national and

international seminars. She is teaching Art History

at Govt.College of Fine Arts, Thrissur since 2005.

Her paintings are widely exhibited and she has

published two poetry collections in Malayalam.

Long back / just before that last young man missed his way to much awaited telegram from ‘future city’ / A

paradise began to lose its people / Medicine men flew away / Lovers went for better groves / Damsels were

transported by seas / Swarming worms never made it, though / Birds with fairy tails hovered above / Spices

looted by invisible forces / Look at those ripe eggs of birds from nowhere / People remaining there, Ha! / No skills

in breeding those nowhere eggs / So they bleed in habits and revolts / As years pass thus: / Things turn great

again / Waves remix stories / Win laurels from unknown rulers / In the devastated shores / What can a poetic

minister of this paradise do, but cry?

This is a poem I scribbled sometime before, to conveycertain sense of disillusionment in the mismatchbetween the creative dreams and the political will powerthat actualises those dreams. This puts the whole matterof creative activity vis-à-vis the cultural history of aregion in a fictional and even fictitious realm. Likemany unarticulated geographies of art in this world,fiction will better picture the region of Kerala in oursense of any possible ‘art history’. If you ask me whereI locate myself, I will simply remember a girl withsketchbook wandering in the paddy fields of a villagecalled Nadavaramba in Thrissur district. This girl withsketchbook has throughout been a devoted reader andlooker. She loves creating chronicles of the dailydemocracy and love experienced in her paradise that isso full of avid mind-watchers. Here are a few notesfrom her books.

“Early stages of life spent in the world of Malayalamperiodical magazines of 1970s, 80s and 90s firstsignaled a discreet world of pictures to me. Elders werefound reminiscing on drawings and sketches byinteresting artists from still earlier decades. Some ofthem had pretty prided collection of magazines as ‘homelibraries’. Only upon quite uncontainable growth of thecollection over a time, these bundles inadvertently gotdisposed off in the name of old stuff, ‘the trash’. Thepictures and stories persist in memory. Those magazineshad plenty of photos, drawings and sketches, mostlyof men and women in actions, gestures, dialogues andmessages. On flipping through many bundles, I haveseen that those people in pictures, especially thosewomen, got extra spectacles, a moustache or blue-green-black lips or eyebrows doodled with sketch-pens orink-pens. They were perhaps personal marks left bysome readers anonymous, perhaps the prided ‘home-librarians’ themselves who must have spent time lookingsilently and quite closely on the pictured people andthey must have irresistibly felt scribbling their personalamendments onto the people-in-picture. As a child andteenager I felt belonged to something about those

pictures that was ‘continuing’. This stuff oftenpersuaded one only to mundane activities but it couldalso sometimes inspire one to try out an artist’s hand indirect sketching from life and nature, or they simplyinitiated one to watch quite a lot of ‘characterisitc’people around and outside of these pages, as if justlanded from a story or an advertisement.

By way of the magazine pages, there is a mergingexperience of fact and fiction, excitement and boredom.Illustrations or advertisement photographs or featurephotos or cover pictures they were, sometimes quitecatchy sort of to look at, sometimes quite boring, yetone wanted them to be there, to go ahead reading theperiodical, especially a novel or story. Supposedly amatter of ‘reading experience’, these pictures and thepeople who made them and laid them out on the page,simply added on to an unguaranteed stuff called‘memory’. One found them neither in art history books,nor in literary histories as instances of importance, inspite of an imposing presence they had in many people’shabit of ‘looking at, reading and talking about art andliterature’ in 20th century.

Strangely enough, once I consecrated to the study ofart and art history in ‘the faculty of fine arts’, thispicture-world receded as a matter from a culturalconfinement. On one hand it looked quite easy toabandon this ossified pictorial stuff pertaining only tothe cultural orthodoxies and mundane behaviors of aparticular reading class. One could perhaps bundle themas chunky journalistic and literary taste. The other sideis that those artists and photographers found inmagazines were quite popularly ‘artistic kind’ around.More over, they involved in the art of looking practicesin a society. The total impact of their momentary andperiodical contributions need be consciously waged,otherwise will be shelved and disposed. And torecognise their cultural functionality, it turns importantto articulate their register. Interestingly, after decadeslong silence, the Malayali cultural public (editors,

readers, writers) was perhaps feeling an irresistible needto acknowledge the art’s local operational mould,particularly the genre of literary illustration. By the late1990s, the cultural scenario of the region turned on acelebrative mode for selected ‘illustrators’, like A.S orNamboodiri. Selective celebration of couple ofillustrators was perhaps an act of cultural pride, but notyet convincing registers of visual culture. It posed animportant problematic of limited containable registersof visual histories to address the art practices of variousIndian modern locales in their own vantages. ‘A livelylaboratory of literacy and media behavior’, Kerala testedthe ideas of public sphere, print capitalism and publicaction, among the Indian language regions (RobinJeffrey: 2004). In an effort to locate the discreetundercurrents of visual modernity brought in by print-pictures of this laboratory, one can historicallycontextualize the Malayali reader, and particularly thiswould be a vision from the unarticulated flip side, theMalayali looker”.

The girl with sketchbook always wanted toconsciously take herself to where she belonged. As aresearcher, she lavishly photocopied the magazine pagesthat caught attention. She never bothered if anydiscipline of documentation existed at all, to archive apopular culture like this. However, a discipline of sortssoon emerged

A ‘Riverside Theatre’ and the ‘Garden of Snakes’

The girl with Sketchbook very often walks in the palemoon. On all such times, she meets a particular woman,only one of her kind, on the banks of a familiar river ofthe century. They stare at each other in dim lights and

blue shades of their life. They both have sprung upfrom the same matrilineal womb, perhaps. The womanhad well painted the womb / the world in thick blacklines. The densely violet forests, passionate men,contemplating women and ochre soil, all looked quitelustful and graphic in her oil painting on hardboard.Men and women appeared in those oil paintings asthoughtful ‘communes’ within a sign system of animals,Extra Spectacles with tube pen by readers

From the sketchbooks of T K Padmini, Courtesy Kerala LalithaKala Academy Thrissur

plants and birds. Nothing was scaled into portraiture.These oil paintings still look like a public space ofnatural beings.

The girl with sketchbook kept noting down sadly; ‘TheMatriarch is missing. Her name is T.K.Padmini. Shedid not decorate the hardboard. She did not abstractthe ‘absolute’ or the ‘primitive’ but her own body,location and imagination. She did not claim any single‘tradition’. She did not speak in ‘words and symbols’.What did seem ‘south Indian’ or ‘Ponnanian’ wasapparently a ‘riverside theatre’ where we both maydance in gleeful bare chest. What is looking like a motifnow is in fact a garden of snakes where Matriarchswere once pleased to do ritual dances. Her oil paintingsare quite bluish dark. Are these communes of men andwomen looking among themselves and movingsideways? Is this a studied performance of some wildnotes from a thoughtful woman who went out to thecity of Madras to study art? She must have once

befriended some men who had a language to look atthe world. She must have looked back at them with thelanguage of nature and the fleeting seasons. However,she had refused the job of a sales girl in an art gallery.She soon returned from studies. Death came quite earlyand she went with the wind that smelled the familiarsnakes’.

The girl with sketchbook quickly turns uncannybecause she remains to live and paint in a world ofmissing Matriarchs, whom she today just titles as ‘Ms.Memorias’ and whom she identifies with, in the coverphotographs of old periodicals.

‘I am left with a commune that I will experimentwith, in order to live on. I have to be graphic. I lovethose lungi-clad men who twist me into a ‘pee-cockwoman’. Not simply matrriarchs, much other stuff ismissing now. How will one break a language of artwhen one has not even created or witnessed one such,in spite of living in a paradise? The naked or full robedgoddesses, what else is really ruling our eyes?’

More notes from the grey areas

The girl with sketchbook likes to register all the artistsshe met in a literate-media sensibility.

The artist, in a literate-media sensibility, has tonegotiate with the assumption of an artist being a tool-driven animal, and the writer, the inhabitant of all thatis legitimately ‘language’. Life of many such artistsmet with the demanding extra task of claiming the rightto language. In a creative act, the tool is not simplyany characteristic material (like word) of the writer or(like brush) of the artist, but tool brings into effect thearbitrary mediations of anything that involves the mind-watch of anybody in a creative domain. It can, at leastbe assumed that the thing exists because of ‘thesupreme word’, that denotes the thing to equip it for acommunication system. Artist’s right to language is butindirect. Just like the window of a fast running trainalluded to the sense of collage in the modern world,

Lifestudy of Ms.Memoria - Acrylic on Canvas -Dr. KavithaBalakrishnan-2010

things in the world often allude to the sensations anddiscourses elsewhere, underlining the connections ofmind and materials. A train’s Window is not the collage,but it is as arbitrary a connection as that between theorigins of a word and its meaning, something that takesshape by uses of certain people in times and spaces.Yet, a fact remains that the thing called window of atrain had to wait for an argumentative Bruno Loutar,extensively lecturing and writing on the ‘Trains ofThought’! Actually for both the writer and the artist, inorder to drag themselves into the domain of language,

the characteristic material (brush, paint, word etc) hasto adapt itself to the arbitrariness of things that influencethe mind-watch. When that adaptability dies at anossified end, perhaps one has to become a fetishist ofone’s own characteristic material, the word, the line,the brush, the pen, the popularity. Then that materialof a writer or an artist turns up just as an object, outsidethe parameters of language. The characteristic materials

are mistaken as ‘tools’ when one thus meets the deadends of expression. Be it in the life of modern Indianartist M.F.Husain, or in the life of a literary illustratorfrom Kerala, Vasudevan Namboodiri, it is at such stagesthat artists start to ceremoniously perform their ‘brushstrokes’ in the company of their public. A techniquefetish, in fact, tethers an artist, more, to some disciplineof sorts, than towards any language. Conveniently then,a writer remains a writer and an artist remains an artist,thereby maintaining their cordial distances, hauntingtwo seemingly separate domains. And their publicboasts of ‘creative harmony’ of the writer and theillustrator.

Artists in malayali literate-media sensibility in factgenerated manifold attitudes. For a long time, someartists were found competently running as if in a race,in which the verbal texts always claimed to havefinished the game of pondering over meaning. Whenthe artist unwittingly gave ‘the realistic’ (synonymouslyhere, the academic) stuff, the game for meaning wasnot even allowed to start and meaning not worthy to bepondered upon. When a few people legitimately trainedin art are found making gestural amendments in thefamiliar academic sketching, like what had always beendone by M.V.Devan, A.Shivaraman or Namboodiri forexample, the game was allowed to start. Largelyidentified as ‘illustrators’, they joined the literarydevises of producing pictures at ‘the finishing point’,in consequence of a powerful verbal act of the writer.The more intelligent of these illustrators negotiated aspace as ‘artists’ within their available field asillustrators. Some artists who always believed to bepure ‘practicing artists’, tried to avoid this ‘failure gamewith writers’. On special editorial requests, they gaveillustrations, only to hand over batons again to thosemore complacent ‘service sector’ artists. Many pulp-fiction-artists, who largely produced poster bodies forfilm posters and advertisements, secretly prided in thepleasure of getting their ‘design’ (also cartoons, photo-graphics, illustration or commercial lay-out) reproducedinto many copies, basking in the easy assurance of much

Illustration by A S for the novel _Bhrasht_ by Matampu

Kunjukuttan, Mathrubhumi Azhchappathippu,1972

public acceptance, also adding to the affluence of some‘lord publisher’.

Anxiety on commercial significance drove manyartist-people astray and not to experience a due ‘share’in cultural consumption of their own ‘design act’. Butthey kept focusing on certain things- the audience, thetechniques and the habits in the world. Whilecontributing pictorial materials to periodicals, theyseemed to thrill the people’s mind-watch. ‘Thrill’ issimply the discreet connection between people and thevisual techniques. Though the distinguished premisesof ‘art’ and ‘culture’ largely discounted and obscuredthis thrill in many contexts, the mass media especiallythe print around the world have variously harnessedthis ‘thrill-quality’, and without much of confessions.

Different world-cultures would variously give storiesand histories of graphic thrills that negotiated withchanging cultural distinctions of a dominant public. Inthe case of Kerala, it is the lively local public withself- assured distinctions - the writers, thinkers, and

readers who emerged ceremoniously in 20th century.Another more visual kind of public comprised of artists,lookers and mind-watchers were also there, but moresilently present. They got only categorically gratifiedand largely discounted by the livelier verbal public.That kept a graphic attitude in wait in this society.

The game of mind-watching

While flipping through those endless photographsfrom the laboratory of pictures and fictional writingsin Malayalam periodicals, somebody asked the girl withsketchbook; ‘Where are these beautiful smiling womenin checkered blouses and lungis now? Are they all nowin the market places, all looking quite same, sad andmelancholic, devoid of all innocence?’.

The sketchbook-girl said, ‘they are the missingmatriarchs, once fabricated so well in print media andphoto-retouching techniques. Now in the age of Photo-shopping, they also perhaps change their attitude’.

The digital graphics today is less confessional. Itassumes no more of art but design. Back in history, thecover pictures and their manually more facilitatedgraphic processes were stretching the verbal and thevisual domains, hence had more graphic purposes; toconnect with collective imaginations through ‘parts-of-things’ shown. Photographs printed in magazineswere put forward as if in a speech-like engagement forlooking. As long as the picture had no intentions tospeak, it would suggest itself as a site to ‘look’.Photographs generally did not intend ‘to talk’. Butcertain sense of literality was by default ‘mind-watching’ upon photos. By the act of looking, one whois basically verbal suddenly gets calibrated, in order to‘explain with titles’. Titling a photograph or a paintingis an exercise on mind-watch, based on some inevitableassumptions. The editors also were tempted by ‘theparts-of-things’ in a photograph that generally stoodalone with no intentions to talk. ‘Stand alone’ visualscommanded a mind-watch from the looker.

Cover Photo by K B, Mathrubhumi Azhchappathippu,1968

By fictional imagination, one can undo ‘reality’ ofsorts in a picture, just as it is in life. The editors couldoften recognize the allowances of the undone realityfacilitated by pictures. Still they often prioritized theartists over photographers, especially in the matters offiction. The literary illustrators thus emerged as muchauthoritatively favored people for the collective mind-watch of the writer and the reader. Literary illustratorsevolved through decades of habitual sketching, blockmaking and printing regimens, crisscrossing thehazardous assumptions regarding the ‘artistic’‘commercial’ and the ‘popular’ stuff. At their best,oozing out of the bottleneck of literary text, they infact explored an index of the real world characters,touching the journalistic framework itself but withoutlosing the spell of ‘the artistic act’. More than mind-watch, that ended up as an act of people-watch. Thestretching of the verbal and the visual domains turnedpractically impossible for illustrators, as there had

always been those general protocols of art and literaturethat kept them separated, so that somebody rarelycrossed the limits and confused the editors about theirreadership. And in the writer’s workshops of Malayalamstories and novels, most of them rejoiced in the‘characters’ taking birth and living out lives, inflashbacks and in the present, with the laudablecollaboration of illustrators who could duly cast thepeople’s body as figure-types.

‘Take Me Where I Belong’

Chance viewing of pictorial excerpts from culturalmemory-houses would eventually evoke dreams of analternate world where sheer arbitrariness would generatevisual mindscapes, connecting things otherwiseregistered at different locations. The literate-mediaconsciousness caught in its representational attitudeshad been fashioning its photographs in the uncanny,

Cover, photograph by N.V.Krishna Warier- MathrubhumiWeekly, January, 1950

Painting in the series 'Take Me Where I Belong' series byShibu Natesan

unauthentic, and hence crazy manners. The girl withsketchbook looks at the flipside of all photo-retouchingartist’s fabricating skills. Further she thus notes downthe arbitrariness of the Malayali collective imaginations:

“In these pages I can possibly accommodate one suchinstance I came across, while doing the documentationworks. Once in a while, a strange sense of beautystrikes, when one looks at pictures from the past. Onesuch occasion arose when I chanced upon a coverphotograph of Mathrubhumi Illustrated Weekly. It wasa photograph of a gymnast doing archery using legsthat are tilted up. Picturing the impossible posture, thephoto touched upon a curious pleasure-viewing.Eventually one realizes that this photograph, printedout long back for the public, had found space insidedusty shelves. On a later point that came my way,quite sometime after I had already watched and gotperplexed by the glazing acrobats in a series of paintings(titled as ‘Take me where I belong’) by Shibu Natesan.The photographic act of catching someone in a situationof difficulty or impossibility, directly strikes at the cordsof social spaces that are politically achieved bystretching the limits of possibilities. Interestingly, theperiodicals used to present plenty of stories on‘achievers’, among which ‘women achievers’ allthroughout the century had turned up as extra sumptuousimages that aroused curiosity and pleasure-viewingamong the onlookers. Women achievers were taggedwith certain cues of impossibility and put across in anuncanny manner, with an over made-up context. Theroutes of mind-watching could be converging at somepoint or the other, depending upon the cultural inputsfrom a photographer, or an artist or a reader. Yet, letme connect a further more important fact. Whatbasically struck me as ‘discreet beauty’ in that coverpicture must be its evanescent color tones achieved notsimply by photographer or lay-out artist or a foremanwho once made it print-ready. All these labors weregrilled through the printing process and a final print-

effect is out, those dead pan blues and greens, thosereds redder than the red. The evanescence I am familiarwith in contemporary art is definitely of different nature,yet some strange quality of memory connects me witha contemporary looking practice on paintings. It is notthe theme of acrobatics alone that took me to engage ina mind-watch’.

Graphic language is contemporary because it connectsarbitrary things and times. This would defy our culturalcompartments that generally keep artistic tastes andlocations astray, without reasons and registers. Graphicattitude can weave collective imaginations of modernsocieties. It depends upon mind-readings acted out bypeople with many attitudes, the editor-like, the writerly,and the artistic ones. Perhaps casual illustrators caughtin the literature’s regimens of characterization were notable to contribute much to this because one had to cancelthe ‘illustrative attitude that is in service of verbalbehaviors’ in order to do quite a bit to re-orient themultiple pictorial tastes in the media. When one doesthat, one has to dissociate oneself from certain sensesin which each attitude is used, like divorcing thediscourse of comic from what is comic in that genre,like separating illustration from what is ‘illustrative’ init, or like dissociating graphic novel from what is ‘novel’in it and the very act of reading is to be liberated fromwhat is ‘language’ (synonymously verbal) about it.

People in this paradise have been dissociating theirsense of ‘art’ from what was supposedly ‘art’ in thegeneral art-world and art-historical establishments.Print-media, photography, cartooning, filming,illustrating, graphic novel making and such technically-oriented (not really technologically-oriented) visualculture in this region has throughout been quite strongdialectic practices of modern times. Quite intrinsically,the malayali visual culture, I mean the mind-graftedpictorial language of looking and reading, surfaces nowin the mainstream practices now, in the works of manycontemporary artists with Malayali orientation. The

radical shift that once gave shape to something called‘Modern art’ in south India initiated by K C S Panikkeralso had worked around powerful motifs culled out ofmysterious and quite clannish mind-watchingcapacities. But that breed of modern artist’s unnaturaldissociation from society was self-defeating. Nowonder, as a woman, by default marginalized in arthistory at her moment, T.K.Padmini had well aheadimagined an inevitable ‘commune’ of men, women andnature, all under the lunatic nightlights. This short-livedartist was once ideally but silently equipped for acontemporary Malayali visual culture. This was sooncomplicated by sculptor Kanayi Kunjiraman’sMalampuzha dam site sculpture Yakshi. Dubbed incultural disgust, that sculpture prompted the pleasuresof gendered looking practices. Adding onto this werethe wide-spread cultural figure-types cast by illustrators,photographers, and other assorted graphic people.Today, it is this still unacknowledged world of print-picture practitioners from a discreet cultural memory-house that equips the Malayali society for acontemporary visual culture.