(An article published in the monographic/commemorative book about J.M.S.Mani, edited by Ramesh Chandra and published by the Ken School Old Students and Well Wishers Association, Bangalore, 2007)
(J.M.S.Mani as an amalgamation of the interaction between what we
understand by the terms ‘ Ken School’, ‘Hadapad’ and ‘Badami’, not in
the same order)
JMS Mani
JMS Mani
It is not a mere coincidence that the decision to bring down the
building housing the well known Ken School of Art in Bangalore and the retirement of J.M.Subramani (J.M.S.Mani)—(as) its Principal—is happening in the same year–2007. With his retirement, the ‘Ken School Era’—more of a Bauhaus concept than a physical reality, usually identified with R.M.Hadapad–comes to its logical end.
If Nadoja R.M.Hadapad was the ‘brain’ and ‘heart’ behind the concept
of Ken as a ‘school of visual discourse’, Mani happens to be its
muscle power. The ‘physical’ inputs to any given cultural construct is
never considered to be as relevant as its ‘conceptual’ inputs, in the
way we have defined our culture, by and large *1*. It is a given,
generalized and simplistic understanding that Mani enacted what
Hadapad perceived and dreamed. But there was a difference between
these two stages of concept and enactment. This amounts to Mani’s
contribution both as an artist and a pedagogue. With him there is no
difference in between art as a gallery practice and art as a pedagogic
exercise*2* . Arguably this is the unique contribution of Mani, not as
much to the art of Karnataka or India, but for the very grammar of
artistic practice itself, in a specific time and space. Hence,
generalization of art towards its own time-bound practices like
‘demonstrations’ is what is thus challenged by him, through his
art.*3*
Mani played a second fiddle in the making of Ken school and he made it
in such a way that while everyone remembers him, nobody seems to know
‘how’ to remember him! He lacks the sophistication of most of his
ex-classmates and some of his students with international bearing.
This perhaps incidentally inspired him to commix art in theory and
practice, which the art intelligentia around him have given up and
written off as a chapter already concluded.
Let me be very specific about how I am trying to identify Mani’s
uniqueness*4*. First of all, I am a bit apologetic about positioning
my argument from within the premise of a methodology wherein an
artist’s art is understood and experienced (a) from and (b) due to
his/her lifestyle. Yet I am confident about stepping out of it for a
while, in order to do what Mani himself has done: He did not follow
the given construct of the art community around him—either
conventional or progressive–in defining what ‘art is’ and how it is
being ‘produced’ .
Mani laid stress on the act of art-demonstrations, inside and outside
art schools in general and Ken school in particular. He metamorphosed
the same practice even within his private studio. He can paint with
the speed that some of his better known friends’ sketching abilities.
He can (and has proven) his ability to imitate master painters,
seriously. A sense of ‘mockery’ and ‘pastiche’ is thus incurred into
the mainstream argument of the ‘expertise’ for making mostly
semi-abstract paintings *5*.
(II)
Observe the multiple-roles that ‘painting’, as an ‘act’ acquires in his case:
(a) Mani used to paint at times in order to (as though) compensate the
lack of his ability for a verbal dialogue with his students.
(b) He painted in order to compensate himself with monetary security
while not being paid as a teacher, for rather too long (18 years, if
what he himself said was right).
(c) He painted with a sense of urgency, thus legitimizing the
essential quality of a calligrapher.
(d) He painted instead of sketching, and painted like-sketching, while
painting outdoors; and
(e) During study tours he would paint along with his students, thus
breaking the hegemonic order evident between a demonstrator- tutor and
a student- audience.
Thus for him, the act of painting gains more prominence that what is
being painted. And this is the actual content of his paintings! A
performative character peeps in, that links the author/artist to his
creation much more intimately. Mani is Jackson
Pollock-beyond-Greenberg’s-definition of ‘Modern Painting’. His act of
painting, the reasons for that act are:
(a) As if to fill up another domestic act of profit, or
(b) The loss of what one rightfully deserved
Both these characters are embedded within his strokes and hence within
his works. In all his works, (a) he contests the acts of discipline
and contemplation leading to (b) the generally accepted notion of
cultural product as the ‘ end product’ (a finished painting, for
example) and this (c) due to a thorough meditativeness, in front of a
canvas. This is his meditativeness in an empirical mode, even while
facing and pastiche-ing master painters .
JMS Mani
(III)
Thinking about Mani from a regional, immediate mode of cultural perception (call it as Kannada cultural discourse, if required) Mani seems to play the role of a bahuroopi (multiple roles). Despite trying his hand in graphics, glass paintings, murals, sculptures, he is a true painter by art. But not many seem to have noticed this bahoroopa of his painterliness, which, arguably, his teacher Hadapad refuted! The master equated multi-facetedness with variety of objects thus
refuting the intensity of oil paint’s sole capability to do so. This
is a subjective question which both Mani and Hadapad addressed, but/and found extremely opposite answers! Hadapad reminds you of various media, format, idea and methodology, to such an extent that there is no one image, form or media within which Hadapad can becontained. Mani, on the other hand, reminds you of only painting (both as a verb and noun), that too only/mostly “Badami People ” series, despite himself trying out his hand in a variety of media and
materials, more than Hadapad. It is like one of them suggesting the student to paint in colour to solve colour problems while the other solves it by instructing to work in black and white! While Hadapad
left not much trace of physical evidence for his visual perception, Mani’s visual perception is conceptually embedded within a singular media.
Whenever Mani involved in other forms and modes of expression it was
the painter in him that was awake, through and through. This multiple
roles he assigns to painting , and hence is so specific to him, has a
peculiar function in the historicity of 20th century Karnataka art:
(IV)
Today, the art of demonstration alone seems to re-affirms the
‘hierarchy’ between tutors and students within art institutions; and
between the artist-performer and audience in case of a public display.
Equipped with a brisk physical movement and crude realism, to paint
with several pairs of keen eyes behind the painterly hand, might have
a public approval in another form of expression in the same society
from within which Mani hails from—the performance of classical music
and dance. However, in the absence of the form of criticism and/but
the presence of appreciation for music, the same sense of approval but
an absence of criticism has come as a haunting in Mani’s works. His
works are either revered or ignored but never contemplated! The
critical eye seems to be imitating the appreciative attitude of the
classical forms of expression, which was one of the several forms that
found space for expression and debate within the premise of the art
school in which Mani taught. Nowhere else in the other 150 art schools
of Karnataka State did such inter-disciplinary format found solace,
approval and finally, a visual expression.
Nobody remembers him as much as others are remembered. He was a
teacher, is a painter and is going to be a painter forever and
possibly never again a teacher. The pun is intended. The big question
here is (a) does Mani have an identity, (b) is that identity a self
complete identity, (c) is it an independent identity outside his
association with and in the making of Ken School? There seems to be
two Manis for two different audience. In the market he is a painter,
at Ken school he has served as the watch and ward for it. This
‘physically dual identy’, commixed with the ‘multifacetedness of his
painterly quality’ went against him in not being identified in a
typical Mani-style, within the cultural agency that approved and
endorsed only and mainly those who were identified with a specific
style. And Mani is the product of a stylized time, from 1970s onwards
till almost 1990s.
‘Spontaneous’, ‘intuitive’, ‘empirical’, ‘natural’ (but not stylized)
are a few adjectives that critics have assigned, rather easily so, to
his paintings. Ironically, this ‘ease’ would not have come to him if
he were not a teacher. And very few art teachers, (which almost means
‘no’ art teacher), have emerged as a professional painter on the day
of his/her retirement except him.
To repeat it once again, over a tenure of four decades, as a student,
tutor, educationist and principal of Ken school of Art, he has
disproved the fact that art in theory and practice do not gel with
each other, which first of all implies that they are different. He
used to paint to illustrate the idea of ‘making’ art as more relevant
than that of the ‘already made’ art. The same hand and mind of his
would endorse the product as artwork, worthy of a place in white cube
(meaning what we mean to be ‘a gallery’). It was a tradition endorsed
by a teacher’s (Mani’s) teacher R.M.Hadapad, but with a difference,
though. While Hadapad’s artworks are, by and large, unarchived,
unassessed, (hence) unrecognized, the memory of the origin of Mani’s
works—the product of the philosophy of art demonstrations —is
forgotten even before it has been identified, remembered and possibly
endorsed. Hadapad’s works remain as a ‘verb’ and unseen. Any act of
demonstation and Mani’s works, from the same tradition, turn out to be
‘nouns’. He is a visual empiricist which means that he gave up a form
of visual expression that was time consuming. But while doing so, it
was not a virtuous display of a gymnast’s capacitance, but a break
away from a classical definition of meditativeness.
(V)
Lengthy novels have come to their logical end in Karnataka. Short
stories are turning into unedited blog writings, to be written and
published in a matter of minutes in web sites in Kannada (like
www.sampada.net), without the intervention of an editor. The fact that
‘communication has become a cliché’ has itself become a cliché with
the newer media of communication taking ‘control’ of even what is
being said (mobiles in general and SMS in particular and FM
radio-audience interactions). Simultaneously, Mani’s ‘act’ of painting
might have fetched him with physical, domestic comforts, but the rush
to endorse one type of sensibility in art has sidelined his actual
essence. For instance, (i) a vocally discursive, (ii) painterly
expressive, (iii) non-repetitive and a compulsive ability to converse
in English have occupied the prime domain of critical appraisal around
Mani, to which most of his successful friends are subject to. Nothing
wrong about it, but what it sidelines and ignores is an area that Mani
occupies, by and large, as an art personality. The briskness of the
creative and domestic gadgets in the beginning of the paragraph that
surrounds Mani, in Bangalore; and the reason why he painted the way he
did (and does) can be related thus:
The brush strokes of Mani (say as against those of K.T.Shiva Prasad,
his pal) suffer from Norman Bryson’s notion of anorexic quality. The
strokes are ‘marks’ of a set of fingers, which are ‘made’ as though to
compensate the social act of pressing them against the wall for
various physical, cultural and economical discomfort of its creator.
(a) Despite this multi-facetedness and (b) because of the
multifacetedness and (c) due to the quickness in which it
appears–which means not sticking on to one kind of appearance
(together termed as ‘style’)–Mani’s oil strokes are culturally and
aesthetically anorexic. It means that the strokes accept their
subversive role as being secondary and lesser important in the
politics of heroic narratives, in the history of Karnataka art which
has refused a historicity of groups. The ‘archaism’ and
‘predictability’ of art wirting that has construed a historicity for
the art of Karnataka, by and large, arrives at a conclusion about art
and its creators, even before a discourse! Undoubtedly, Mani has been
prey to this.
Even if the history of artistic groups and ideologies are legitimised,
Mani’s strokes suffer from a ‘secondary anorexia’ , despite some of
the rare and unique paths he had trodded even within the premises of a
given canvas or formalism, as described elsewhere earlier in this
article.
Too many artists and their art as cultural products suffer this
anorexic quality in the contemporary post-colonial context. But the
way Mani produces a discourse within his anorexic-strokes, is
remarkably his own . But to do this, one should stop verbally
addressing him in art historical clichés like “being naïve,
expressive, emotional” and re-discover him as he is and not as to how
he fits into some others’ definition .
Should the dream of a rustic personality be a reality only in someone
else’s dream? If Ken, Hadapad and Mani are three points of a triangle,
what makes the two points more brighter than the third one?
FOOT NOTES:
* Plato, apart from being himself, is also the ‘verbal form’
of Socrates. If the content was Socrates’, the style was Plato’s. What
we have in reality is Plato’s version of Socrates. Is there Socrates
beyond Plato is a question similar to Ken School, Hadapad and Mani ‘
outside’ each other. What transpired within the translation of
content into style , from speech to writing is also the story of two
celebrated Greek philosophers who were almost contemporaries. Between
Hadapad and Mani, something similar seems to have happened but from
speech to visual language, in an altogether different contextual mode.
Arguably, Mani is the closest trans-locator of Hadapad’s notion of ‘
free thinking’, the ‘subaltern’ and that of ‘Badami’. It would be an
interesting exercise to place images painted by Hadapad and Mani
together, that should include mainly the Badami views. Hadapad hails
from there, and, arguably there was more of Badami than Bangalore in
Ken school. One contemporary mode of thinking about Mani’s “Badami
Series” of paintings, is to visually enquire into his notion of
Hadapad through Badami views, his notion of Badami’s through what he
means by Hadapad.
This is why I have titled the essay as “Plato’s Badami”. Writing about
Mani, for me, is writing about a place, an institution and two visual
thinkers of contrasting mode. Both inherited a refusal to learn the
ordinary and thus refused to inherit art as pedagogy. And,
ironically, that’s how both become remarkable visual pedagogicians!
*1* The Social Art Historian Arnald Hauser gives an interesting
account of how sculptors were held to be socially a step lower than
painters during the Greek classical times, since because the sculptors
touched their creative materials directly with hand and painters did
so only with their brush. Fast forward by three millennia, the
question of eating habits with hand and fork seem to demand the same
virtue held by that Greek hierarchy, in the city and family structure
within which Mani grew up. Curiously enough, the portraits by Hadapad
that I have seen mostly preferred dark-skinned models as a priority.
(a)The connection between the Periyar Ramaswamy’s Dalit movement in
Tamil Nadu, (b)Tamil as Mani’s mother tongue,
(c) Ken school of 70s and 80s as one of the safe premise for
alternative Shudra, Bandaya and Dalit literary dialogues,
serve as the actual background within which Mani’s personality and
inspiration can be placed. This is to argue that Mani was not naïve to
these happenings nor was he to the politics of imagery that he
produced so very influentially.
*2* & *5* His works shown in Sumukha gallery ( Bangalore) in 2003
mainly focused on the pastiche and kitchy character of the divinity
evident in the contemplative process and seriousness about making
semi-abstract art. Mani was pretty serious about this construct of
seriousness evident in such practices. A list of artists that did not
exclude a clear cut references to painters of the caliber of Ram
Kumar, K.M.Adimoolam, Laxman Shreshta were all referred to, without
mixing the words, so to say. Interstingly, a typical ‘Mani’ himself
was deliberately absent in it. Such a self-referentiality and
self-refutation, together, that contests a ‘hierarchy’ and ‘hegemonic
order’ of ‘a specific construct of visual arts’ is what he got
involved in then as a choice. Naïve painters, that he is so much
suggestively mistaken as, can never get into such a dimension of
visual thinking.
*3* Art Demonstration is one of those pedagogic practice that was in
vogue in the immediate decades after Indian independence and now
re-considered and metamorphosed. It would be too much an ambitious
project to equate it with the new performances occurring within visual
art practice. However, what Clement Greenberg and T.J.Clarke did to
Jackson Pollock’s paintings is a traditional revival of that practice,
in K.G.Subramanyan’s sense of ‘Living Tradition’. Mani, on an
altogether different note, as a teacher and painter, redefined it in
our context, like never before. Note that the demonstrations by
M.B.Patil and B.K.Srinivasa Varma do not endorse this ambitious range
of visual concerns that Mani addresses through this. Instead those two
artists tend to use demonstration as a means for addressing the forms
of inter-disciplinary.
*4* The history of art in Karnataka is also the history of
individuals. This is unlike an overall history of Indian art history
which is about groups. Both are ‘constructs’, which means a sort of
strategies by post-independent art writers. However, if one attempts
to trace the history of art in Karnataka in the context of Ken school
Mani’s role would be that of ‘Hanuman in Ramayana’ as told by Valmiki.
The monkey’s version of Ramayana is untold (see: Anand Patwardhan’s
five minutes film in which the monkeys sing their version of Ramayana,
within which the protagonist is pulled a position that he occupies in
Valmiki’s heroic narrative. Similarly, writing about Mani as a part of
the ideology of Ken school faces the danger of a predetermined
construing of his personality. Though this angle need not be
discarded, it necessarily need to be contested./////
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