JOIN USAmerican artist Waswo X Waswo says that his work is not so much about India as a country but about his interactions with another culture, Giridhar Khasnis writes.
In September 1993, Waswo X Waswo made his maiden trip to India with a short visit to the city of Udaipur in Rajasthan. “After visiting the city the one thing I knew for certain was that I would return. Udaipur’s magical beauties and charms had caught my imagination. With time, I became a regular visitor to India and a frequent traveller through Rajasthan,” he said.
Today, Waswo is known principally for his hand-coloured photographs of ordinary people of Udaipur who pose for him in specially created studio settings. Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and trained in the US and Italy, Waswo has made India his home for more than a decade. His photographs have been exhibited in different cities of the country and abroad. His books like India Poems: The Photographs (2006) and Men of Rajasthan (2011) have come out as a result of his extensive travels within the country. A connoisseur of vintage and contemporary Indian prints, he has developed a large personal collection of etchings, lithographs, woodcuts and screen-prints.
A unique aspect of Waswo’s art is his dynamic collaboration with local Rajasthani painters and colourists who add soul and substance to his digital photographs. While Rajesh Soni brings his talent in hand-painting Waswo’s pictures, Rakesh Vijay brings to life Waswo’s ideas through an intriguing series of miniature paintings; another talented artist, Shankar Kumavat, creates exquisite borders for his works. Subrat Kumar Behera, a young lithographer from Orissa, and Shyam Lal Khumhar, a village potter, are among other artists with whom Waswo has worked with. Tara Chand, an erstwhile rickshaw-puller, who initially helped Waswo set up his house in Udaipur in 2006, has in due course become a close associate and ‘Man Friday’, taking on many important tasks of setting up the sets for the photographs, finding models for Waswo’s camera, etc. Incidentally, the ‘models’ themselves are common men and women like street vendors and manual labourers, all of whom receive a modeling fees from Waswo.
Different strands
One could see different strands working in Waswo’s art. Some of the portraits he has made show people in their natural habitat. Going a step further, he has produced series of dramatically staged pictures of people posed in studio settings amidst elaborately painted screens and village accessories. Then there is an exclusive series of contemporary miniatures, in which Waswo himself features prominently as a self-referential satirical figure.
Waswo’s pictures are noted for their carefully orchestrated stories and episodes, which induce the viewer to think, introspect and enjoy. Subtle humour and irony are intrinsic to his visually-charged and often intensely-autobiographical work. Waswo considers photography as not just an act of ‘clicking’ images, but a process that involves forethought, strategy, timing, an awareness of light and composition as well as narrative and subliminal meanings, rigorous editing, search for printing paper, innumerable test prints, careful lab work and archival storage.
“Sometimes people look at my work and think it is about India,” he explains. “Actually my work is not so much about India as it is about me; it is about my reactions to India and how I have responded to India...It is about the photographer’s interaction with another culture, and how that culture judges that person, and how that person judges that culture; and all those interactions that go on between the two.”
Waswo also avers that he is not really into documenting Indian reality. “Photography is for me an exploration of a fragmented reality. It is a media that is inherently deceptive under its thin veneer of truth telling. In the end, all photographs are autobiographical and subjective. The best of them do not document our day-to-day life, but hold a poetry that transcends it.”
Interest in museums
Waswo’s pictures have often evoked differing reactions ranging from fascination to plain irritation. He feels that different people can view the same image in radically different manners, each modifying their perceptions with their own cultural and historical baggages. “It is a revelation to discover that my work, considered quite traditional and tame in the West, became discomfiting and controversial in the East.”
Waswo has had a keen interest in museums and museum culture for long. For him “a museum is a place of mystery — sometimes almost frightening — as well as a place of knowledge”. He credits his cousin Edward Anthony Green (long serving former art director of Milwaukee Public Museum) for triggering his passion in museology. “Museums, whether they like to admit or not, are also in the entertainment business,” wrote Green, in his essay, Cleverly Rearranged Cabinets of Curios. “It is the designer’s task not merely to attract the audience, but to combine artefacts, statements, light, colour, textures, sound and motion into a communicative whole.”
Green admired American architect, designer and filmmaker Charles Eames who believed that design was not the making of objects, but the making of ways to see. “Objects alone cannot teach us enough about seeing,” said Eames. “It is their juxtaposition in a meaningful whole that really communicates, rather the Gestalt of the total.”
Waswo’s recently concluded exhibition at Sakshi Gallery, Mumbai was curiously titled ‘Sleeping Through the Museum.’ It presented an absorbing blend of ‘museumified objects’ including hand-coloured photographs; framed lithographs of surreal scenes; terracotta artefacts like masks and sculpted blocks; and looped video installation.
Artist vs curator
As one walked through the exhibit, it was clear that the artist who doubled up as a ‘curator’ was not just probing Green’s ideas about ‘juxtaposition’, ‘communication’ and ‘entertainment’ in a new light, but also putting to test the notion of ‘museumification’ of objects in a contemporary context. It was interesting to see how Waswo had generated concepts, participated in the creation of ‘museumified’ objects, as well as playfully intermingled seemingly disparate elements which contributed to the making of a whole.
Humour, satire and sardonic streams ran hand-in-hand in several works, not in the least in a set of innocuous walking sticks displayed with explanation: ‘A cane used for walking upright’; ‘A cane for clearing paths’; ‘A cane to instruct a child’; ‘A cane to beat a snake’; ‘A cane to beat a wife’; and so on. There were many canes on display, but one suddenly realised that it could, in fact, be a single one performing multiple functions! The final bit of irony came through with a simple note: ‘A cane forgotten when he was gone.’
Another equally striking work, ‘Requiem for an Other’, had (besides hand coloured photographs) shelves holding a set of small vials with odd ‘artefacts’ immersed in beeswax; pasted labels described the ‘museumified’ objects belonging to remnants of the life of an anonymous person. A fascinating piece, it succeeded in conjuring up things for the viewer, solemnly and wittily.
While the exhibition set out to question/create an unusual context and meaning for objects, and drew sustenance from simple yet evocative stories, Waswo, in his typical tongue-in-cheek jollity, claimed that it could be seen “as an ethnographer’s dreamscape, a lazy bureaucrat’s afternoon nap, or an overworked museum director’s nightmare.”