When inspiration strikes...

off-beat art

There they are — countless god-fearing individuals stacked on the wall, with just brown faces. They don’t have torsos or limbs.

They are fist-sized terracotta with eyes popping out with curiosity. Similar plastic eyes are glued on all the models. And that’s where their similarity ends. One has a skull on the head, as if the person represented is playing with death. Another has a cow licking his cheek. One carries a pumpkin, symbolic of the burden of the past. A blue globe is caught in the mouth of another individual.

Each of these god-fearing men is manifesting his fear his way. They are not making a definite statement; the art is absolutely open to interpretation.

I have walked into Gallery Espace in New Delhi’s upmarket New Friends Colony to find these men. Artist Manjunath Kamath’s show, Postponed Poems, is about to open. He wears last night’s stubble and walks me through the exhibits that include sculptures and drawings.

Kamath is known for his passion for kitschy pop-art, but this show has an overload of terracotta. “I am in a terracotta phase,” he admits. But I am so hypnotised by the god-fearing men that I postpone the spiel. “So, you fear god?” I throw the question at him.

“God is a friend. I don’t fear him,” Kamath begins and hurries back in memory to his Catholic school in Mangaluru, where a pithy message in Kannada, “Fear of God is the beginning of knowledge,” could be seen above the blackboard.

As a child, Kamath was unable to fathom such religion-laden adages. But he invariably found himself amidst gods, in churches and temples, which he now describes as “my first museums.” He spent hours with local craftsmen, watching them make idols of gods and goddesses. Later, he started collecting classical sculptures and paintings — like ritual masks, wooden and metal sculptures, parts of temple chariots, old terracotta sculptures. Kamath didn’t have any inkling that one day all this would sneak into his art, wherein he’d re-interpret the classical into contemporary connotations.

Then, he did not even know there were art schools. Being a professional artist was not a seed in his mind. No one in the family ever practised art for a living. However, a degree in fine arts from Chamarajendra Academy of Visual Arts (Mysuru) added that stroke of lilac to his destiny.

His two-decade-long art journey has not been linear, though. Not because he has been fiddling with genres to zero in on a niche. It has been a conscious choice.

Manjunath loathes unidirectional practices and the callousness of globalisation to flatten the plurality of aesthetics, and dares to defy and negate predictable ideas, and exhorts “every artist to rethink and question his art practice.”

His repertoire is as varied as possible — drawings, paintings, animated videos and sketch books, digital films and sculptures.

“Is there a favourite amidst all this?” I try to put his genre within parenthesis. Kamath kills that thought. He unabashedly calls himself “jumpy” — “I jump from one medium to another; one image to the next. Once I am done with one medium and one thought, I detach and move to the next,” he says.

He adds that he cannot bring himself to use green, and that he plays with gold to make statements — to defy the artists’ clichéd description of golden being too beautiful.

Kamath reads Rumi and creates a sculpture titled Thousand Mes. He stumbles upon the statue of Shiva with erect penis (from an 18th century Badami temple) and sculpts an unusual terracotta man with urdhwalinga, his torso a complex collation of myriad elements. He creates an image of an innocent god and cages fragments of sculpted history into iron grills.

Gods and history abound in Postponed Poems. Kamath comments, “I have just adopted the poetic way of storytelling, which is beyond its original purpose. I have adopted different styles to construct my narrative with subtle humour and wit. At a certain point it looks like a historical sculpture, but it’s not. This is a kind of clue to viewers that they can build their own narratives.”

Kamath might not be in awe of god. He might dislike rituals. But there is one ritual that he follows religiously — art. The ritual to draw every night. He has cut acid-free paper into a definite size and draws every day. It’s not a series or a linear progression of a thought. Every night when he picks up the pen, he knows not what will draw itself. When the drawing is done, he peeps back into the hours gone by and connects the drawing with a moment, an experience — as an afterthought.

At Gallery Espace, this everyday ritual is framed and nailed on the wall — A man with his tongue out held a cauliflower in one hand, and a brinjal in the other (taken from Kamath’s visit to the vegetable market every Saturday); a foot with gold bubbles around (borrowed from the sight of a girl tying the dancing bells); a pair of flip-flops with feet turned the other way (done in a moment of glee).

“I like wit in art,” Kamath confesses. He has once painted 1,008 pairs of eyes on different sheets and hanged them from the ceiling. Eyes staring at the visitor. Kamath does jump from one thought to another, each as deep as the previous one. The artist tangled in them during the process of creation and then walking away from it.

Kamath, forever expanding his visual vocabulary, does not know the language of his next art. But he will not forge it. Manjunath Kamath lets his art ‘happen’.