Art review
The performance marathon of ''Live Art 2011'' (NGMA, Venkatappa Gallery, November 18 to 22) with participants from India, Switzerland, Asia and Israel brought complex, thoroughly conceived and often subtle, spectacular or moving works enacted in closer spaces which offered close contact.
Through the artist’s presence
Hence, the best contributions indeed revealed the specificity and uniqueness of the medium which allows the spectator to witness and co-feel the experience and sensitivity of the artist during the creative process in its occurring. The artist’s presence, without which there is no art work but which may not be evident in other media, becomes the focus in performance; thus allowing for a tangible link and intense, empathic perception whose immediacy narrows the gap between the artist and the audience.
The level was not even, some of the younger individualities not working mainly with performance or still forming (I Gade Made Surya Darma, Aung Myat Htay, Mangala, Vasudev C, Deepak D L, Manas Acharya, Janini Chandima Cooray, Suresh Kumar G R).
Although certain elements of their imagery did strike with beauty, power or originality, like the shower of flower petals in the sun, the strange glow of transparent colour sheets, the burning self-portrait statue or the white abstract painted by a body, those not always translated into a sufficient suggestion of meaning, at times remaining vague and inaccessible under arbitrary metaphors, otherwise literal without enough expressiveness.
The mature, and not only, performance artists offered a range of accomplished pieces, indirect, nuanced understatement guiding the Western artists, whereas the drastic loudness of their realities sporadically entered the language of the Asian ones.
Monica Klinger in very restrained, subtle gestures conjured a lyrical human bird of emotive aspiration. Sheer mood permeated also the work of Marcus Goessi who fiddling with music recordings, like an adult child tried to fill the melancholia of his loneliness.
Dimple Shah’s multi-sensorial environment of black depression had wonderful passages and overdone ones. Disturbing issues occupied Ma Ei who on a note of graceful mischief challenged gender stereotypes, while Bandu Manamperi messily broke hundreds of dripping eggs, the Sri Lankan context recognisable in the violence over worthless lives.
A few fine instances addressed the place, Harveet Singh Rahel Sahej as a dignified, archaic man of creativity traversing the NGMA architecture to gently mark the onlookers with his artistic torment, Deepak striving to pull down a massive column in protest against the museum institution and Vijay Sekhon relating prosaic conversations to evoke a poetic kinship with the idealism of Venkatappa.
The artist’s presence and connectedness to the surroundings as well as to the audience who becomes drawn to interaction underscored the efforts of other performances. Tamar Raban began by an ordinary act of feeding birds to end with an unusually touching evocation of human and avian closeness in partaking of nourishment.
Rough yet enchanting, Janini’s web of hair plaited by everyone established a palpable sense of bonding. Dorotea Rust alluding to games involved a crowd in an intuitive response of mutual complementariness that ended in dance. Splendidly emotional in its respectful, modest openness onto others which opened them up, and in its sadness of memory and inevitable distance, Susheel Kumar’s performance had perhaps the most enduring impact on everyone there, as it framed and summed the festival along with its underlying spirit and imbued all with a tabgible aura of tenderness and connection.
Calm focus
The “Photos for Rato” exhibition held last month at Tasveer was a collection of prints by Nicholas Vreeland, a Swiss-born photographer who lives at the Rato Dratsang in Mundgod. Shot there, the images are an unpremeditated and quietly focussed return to the art.
Unassumingly simple, they seem to hold, on the one hand, a straight, sensitive attuning to the sitters and sceneries, respectful of and receiving their inherent character and, on the other, a fair amount of conventionality, while their black and white underscore both the archaic, remote nature of that word and the aesthetic immersed in the classic, somewhat old-fashioned ways of perceiving it.
Vreeland’s portraits are usually taken in a frontal directness without probing that reveals what the person wishes or is able to project. They can be gracefully
