Blue Collar and Bluestocking: Janet Gilmore at Cleveland MOCA

Janet Gilmore, post-performance set for Love 'em, Leave 'em,MOCA Cleveland, 2013. Structure is 10' high and contains over 150 smashed
 ceramic vessels, many of which contained white, black, or pink paint.

Kate Gilmore: Body of Work assembles in one gallery of the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland five videos documenting the artist's performances of recent years. In a separate gallery, we see the installation that resulted from her recent commission at the museum. The performance, Love 'em, Leave 'em  occurred earlier in the spring, but its set remains until the show closes on June 9.

Piled inside the stage are smashed ceramic pots and dried rivers of the paint they held. Some of the paint flew out in great sweeping gestures when the pots were dropped through holes in the top of the set, causing grand, gestural marks of the sort we associate with Abstract Expressionist painting. It's hard not to make the association, at the same time that it's risible even to think it: The palette of white, black, and pink is so graphic that only artists of advertising or interior design might use it. Its delivery, too—via ceramic vases and vessels tossed through holes by a woman clad in stockings and shirtdress—is hardly the method of the heroes of modern art.

All the broken dishes makes me think of domestic spats heated to the point of china-hurling; of landfill; or of ancient Greeks casting shards to send a citizen into exile. Whatever was loved on this stage, was left abruptly, and with no love lost.

While there are probably positive things to be said about this set as a work of art, I wouldn't be the person to commend it. The video that was made of Gilmore's performance that resulted in what lies here—that is another, and exciting, thing altogether. At its beginning, the stage is completely white. Gilmore, barefoot in black stockings and a simple shirtdress (she could be a school teacher or an office manager), brings pots to one side of the stage, placing them on the tiered steps. After she arranges several as high up as she can reach, she begins to climb, carefully moving the pots ahead of her up the stairs. Then she scoots them along the top of the stage, scuttling behind them. She heaves them then, one by one, through the several holes cut for that purpose, before descending the opposite side, where she plunges immediately into the same procedure of collecting and moving vessels into position before throwing them to the stage floor.

From video of Love 'em, Leave 'em. Janet Gilmore
places vessels on stairs to be moved to top of
the set. Video courtesy of the artist and David
Castillo Gallery, Miami.

This performance lasts for just over one hour, during which time Gilmore doesn't depart for a moment from her routine of placing pots, moving and hurling them, then descending to repeat those activities from the other side of the stage.The viewer watches her grow sweaty and her hair get sticky and limp. The steps are steep and narrow. She has to avoid tripping in the the holes at the narrow top of the stage. Her work must be exhausting. It is tense and to watch.

Gilmore's labors are the opposite of artistic: They seem compulsive. At best, she seems duty-driven to consume or to rid herself of what I learned were over 150 pots: She sees this as her job. And it is an urgent, significant one for her. Despite the repetition, she doesn't perform her work mechanically, but with grit and determination and as fast as she can, with sweaty persistence. It is a deeply committed presentation.

But the performance is so repetitious that the watching grows tedious. After a while, I found myself restless and ready to move on to something else. Yet when it came to actually standing up, I just couldn't do it: I was too emotionally engaged by the doggedness of the performer. In a place beyond subject or meaning, the persistent activity was compelling in and of itself simply because she did not give it up. Gilmore executed every movement as if it were the climactic activity. Her apparent compulsion to execute whatever purpose drove her made it impossible to step away, for that would have been to consign her labor to the realm of the absurd. The video encouraged a bond between audience and protagonist through respect  for simple and determined daily effort for whatever banal, unspoken goals we set ourselves.

But Love 'em, Leave 'em is, like the rest of Gilmore's videos in Body of Work, open to all sorts of interpretations. It could be "about" the continuing influence of Abstract Expressionist painting and our acceptance of the idea of inspired sources. It could be, as Museum materials suggest, about gendered labor, the way this woman undertakes an extremely physical, demanding process in stockings and dress—in clothing that restricts her motion. Both of these threads are certainly present, working all together to elevate a dead set into a lively locus for ideas, when we know the history of its making.

Janet Gilmore, from My Love is an Anchor, 2004. Video with sound, 7:05 mins.
Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery, Miami.

In another gallery, five of Gilmore's earlier, edited videos are installed on side-by-side screens, each with its soundtrack playing. It was a great decision to show them this way, for they complement each other and the sounds reinforce one another's. In each film, Gilmore is in a situation of needing to endure some punishing circumstance in order to free herself. My favorite of these was the earliest, My Love is an Anchor from 2004.

In this film one hears the pounding of the hammer that beats and claws at the bucket of plaster that it setting around the artist's foot. (The gallery note informs us that this causes Gilmore's foot to swell, so it is in actuality imperative that it be released as soon as possible.) It was not obvious to me that she was making much progress, but the effort was massive: She pounds in frantic bursts, then pauses to wipe her hair out of her face and continues. Ah, love! Oh, love and marriage, love and commitment! Everyone wants to have it for life, until the "anchor" of permanence becomes the ball and chain—the bucket of cement in which we're fixed, at the mercy of others.

Janet Gilmore, Between a Hard Place, 2008. Video with sound, 9:43 minutes.
Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery, Miami.

Two more videos in which our heroine is struggling to free herself are 2008's Between a Hard Place and Standing Here from 2010. In Between a Hard Place, we watch her punch through walls only to find herself confronted with yet another gray wall, through which she beats her way to yet another...and on, presumably ad infinitum. Her equipment for this is only what she has on her. She is dressed in a formal, black dress, with sheer hosiery and high heels. In this shot from the film, she holds not a hammer, but one of her shoes: She uses its heel as a tool for battering the walls. 

Standing Here places Gilmore in a narrow box of a room, which she attempts to scale, towards the camera, continually sliding down again and having to start agin. The scenery , like that in Between a Hard Place, is colored for graphic impact, the yellow backs of walls contrasting to the dull surfaces presented to the protagonist. In this one, her clothing pops out  particularly—the red dress, black gloves and boots.

Janet Gilmore, Standing Here, 2010. Video with sound, 10:48 min.
Courtesy of the artist and David Castillo Gallery, Miami.

In this film we see Gilmore work unaided by even a spike heel. This is the most visceral and physical of all the films. She is driven by the force of  her determination and the strength of her body to punch, batter, and deconstruct the panels around her in aid of climbing up the tower she's confined in.

In these films, I easily, immediately find feminist content. Gilmore's lady-like costumes are ridiculously out-of-place, given her workmanly settings and large, aggressive gestures. Yet she labors with complete lack of self-consciousness, unquestioningly. If she doesn't notice the restrictiveness of her garb, who put her in it? Who handicapped her this way? As in Love 'em, Leave 'em, we see an indomitable person, determined to accept and perform a role that she has appears to accept and take seriously. 

A woman is given a Sisyphean task, to which she devotes steady, unflagging energy, even when there's no aid, resolution, or escape in sight. Where we expect to see a manly construction worker, we see a woman, working the constructed world apart by the strength of her own hands and body, perhaps to begin again to build something less confining, premised on ideas shaped by the power of feminine minds.

Czech Puppets and Their Tradition, at the Columbus Museum of Art

Seeing Strings Attached: The Living Tradition of Czech Puppets at the Columbus Museum of Art (on display through August 25) makes the viewer feel the anguish of the prince who stumbled upon the room where Sleeping Beauty lay encased in crystal. Three galleries full of high-strung individuals in suspended animation! Each face so individualized; every figure shaped not only by anatomy, but by symbolism and its position in a condensed moral

Artist unknown. Devil, 19th century

narrative. With the exception of some video, the show leaves all the beautiful puppets hanging along the walls or posed in groups under vitrines, sometimes in decorated settings. The show is at once disappointing and achingly tantalizing: Let the action begin! We want the show! The introduction to the show acknowledges this inherent difficulty: "Accept the invitation to this enchanting landscape that will draw you close by its strings to a world of fantastic stories and heroes...You, the spectator, are invited to bring the puppets to life..."

The show is a collaboration between the Museum (Carole Genshaft, adjunct curator), the Ohio State University (Joe Brandesky, guest curator), and the Arts and Theatre Institute in Prague (Nina Malikova, curator). Private collectors have loaned most of the materials. The many historical notes provide the narrative illustrated by the abundant, fascinating puppets themselves. The story is about puppetry that has been, since the 17th century, a way to maintain ethnic identity in an area of Europe claimed throughout history by an uninterrupted succession of authoritarian political entities: Bohemia, the Hapsburg Empire, Germany, and the Soviets. Though it has integrated puppetry traditions from all over Europe, one constant of the Czech puppet tradition was preservation of the local language, which was always secondary to the reigning power's.

Karel Kobrle, Faustus, Kaspar and two devils on an Ales's Family
Theater stage, manufactured in 1913.

Puppetry in the Czech Republic has never been simply a form of children's amusement, but has been story-telling for all ages and for many purposes. Its subjects have included fairy and folk tales; plays based on the world's great literature; operas; and topical, politically subversive works. Contemporary Czech puppetry mingles with traditional theater and is integrated into live-action film. It has emerged from the nineteenth-century work of itinerants, to domestic parlor entertainment, to become housed in dedicated, state-of-the-art theaters that now exist exclusively for this art form.

Strings Attached offers both the pleasure of seeing many instances of stock puppet characters and singular figures clearly intended as high art objects for high art settings. In the pictures above, we see a truly fearsome devil with one hoof and one foot; in the other, devils lurk behind Faustus and his red-capped servant, Kaspar. Kaspar is the Czech version of the English Punch, appearing in all sorts of settings. He's introduced here even into a homemade version of tragedy, bringing the absurd and earthy with him. 

The show's other Kaspars are a wonderful bunch, each with his own personality, his own physique and expression. A 19th century hand-puppet by Jan Flaschs, Jr., (right) has the carved expression of the philosopher fool, a sage in motley, all the sadder for its drooping lack of animation. But the early, crude see-saw- motion Kaspar is a peasant all the way: No introspection here, just work and low comedy to ease the movement through life.

Another hand puppet, a stunned-looking Kaspar (left), appeared in film, not on stage: in Punch and Judy, a 1966 film by Jan Svankmajer. The film features two Kapers (Punches) who engage in a tradition of their character: They fight—in this case to the death—over a live guinea pig. The exhibit offers only a tiny photo out-take from the film, but it certainly whetted my appetite for the whole. A tradition of red puppet clowns responding to the motions of a live guinea pig? The comic possibilities in the very concept are tremendous on the face of it!

Still shot from Punch and Judy, 1966 by Jan Svankmajer.

Devils are also well represented in Strings Attached. A note mentions that the story of Dr. Faustus has always been popular in Czech puppet theater, as death and the grotesque have been native aspects of the culture and folk traditions. The devils shown in this show are convincingly particularized. They are all black, not red, though this seems to suggest soot—the result of flame rather than the flame itself. They are clearly not racially black; if anything, they are bestial, having the cloven hoof, horns, and even fur-covered bodies. They go unclothed. 

The faces of these two unattributed nineteenth century devils demonstrate something I found fascinating about all the puppets: Their faces are carved not into neutral expressions that I would have assumed the choice for flexibility. They are carved, rather, into striking, definitive attitudes. It made me stop and think how much what we see is affected by the context--how the fixed, fierce face of a devil will in fact assume in motion any number of expressions as it is introduced among other characters in different settings; through the course of a drama; and against different backdrops designed or imagined.

Petr Matasek, Devil, 2001

Petr Matasek is at the pinnacle of contemporary Czech theatre design; his puppets for a production of the Faust legend demonstrate how far puppet-making has moved into the realm of fine art. His Devil is carved in such baroque detail, with fur affixed, strategic use of red, and such fixity of limbs that we are as impressed and amazed by his strangeness as we were by the human features of the earlier devils. The artifice is so beautiful and wrong; does his awkwardness make him terrifying or sympathetic? Perhaps there's more to fear from a devil we try to understand.

Petr Matasek, Devilyn, 2001

Matasek's three figures from the 2001 Johan Doctor Faustus are among the high points of the show. In addition to the puppet above, are Faustus himself and, most remarkable of all, the femme fatale, brilliant in concept and execution. Tall and drawn out, Devilyn has every trait of irresistible feminine sexuality on display and available. Her uncovered breasts are like torpedoes. Her face is brightly painted. She's wearing a satiny red skirt, pulled back even, to reveal her bush—but it's a beard. In fact, it's the devil's beard, for his inverted head forms her legs and sexual parts. It is a stunning idea, realized so boldly: I'm dumbfounded by the idea of a show with this figure in action.

Olivia, 1995 execution of 1925 drawings by
Anna Suchardova-Brichova.

There are many exceptional artists presented; people whose breathtaking skill in carving is put to the service of great fancy and insight. In the 20th century puppets, we see a great variety of forms bursting from a veritable garden of performance ideas, ranging from the rusting and rough-hewn to very polished and refined. A set of puppets for Shakespeare's Twelfth Night were executed in 1995, but designed in 1925 along the lines of the simple, clean lines of the Bauhaus aesthetic. Viola is a doll, onto whom the iconic role of the chaste, love-beleaguered mourner can be thrust.

Stylized, but in a more comical vein, are the 2005 puppets for an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's children's story, The Happy Prince. These puppets wear fabric costumes atop upholstered bodies. This gives them a warmth beyond any available to their kin made entirely of wood, or even to the hand puppets which affix wooden heads to loosely draped cloth costumes. Warmth, in general, is not a feature of the puppets in this show; few have any reassuring or inviting presence. Whether their dramas generate comforting emotions is a question I'd like to know more about. Because they are nearly all carved of wood and

Zdenek Hajduch, puppets for The Happy Prince, 2005.

stylized to varying degrees, they seem indeed to be material for a medium of ambiguity, absurdity, irresolution; for hard edges and dark subjects.

But Olivia is an exceptional wooden puppet. Most of the carvers take the wood in less highly refined directions, though without being any less self-conscious in its use. Robert Smolik's rough-hewn figures for the fairy tale, The Seven Ravens, retain every mark of the chisel. In the story, a mother's curse transforms her sons into ravens, who are redeemed by their sister's persistence and love. The roots of such a story in folklore and archetype make such raw handling of the material seem particularly right—compared especially to the high art Shakespeare Olivia, painted and polished, above.

Robert Smolik, figures from Seven Ravens, 2001.

Another artist in 2003 made a revolving stage with figures for performances of the fairytale of Hansel and Gretel. Again, the artistry is great and the carving is beautiful. It is rhythmical and precise, by the manner is rough. The handling of the material itself "sets the stage" for the beloved story of innocence and power claimed.

Strings Attached is an art show giddy with an abundance of beautiful material, but it is also a show about stagecraft. While one misses the action and longs to sit and laugh or cry over the multitude of stories inherent in the three galleries, the compensation is the fascinating opportunity to glimpse playmakers' decisions about styling, costuming, and even about set design. It's a rare, multifaceted, and absorbing show. It's wonderful: full of wonders.

Vignette from 2009 film Toys in the Attic. Stop-action animation, drawn animation, and live action.
Features voices of Forest Whittaker, Joan Cusak, and Cary Elwes.

 All photography by the author.

Involuntary Improvisation

I've written with pleasure about musical improvisers: the Tone Road Ramblers sextet that composes improvisationally, and the ADD Trio, which works at the pinnacle of jazz improvisation—that is, making changes on a set tune stated in a particular key. I've also written about violinist Dorothy Martirano, whose eclectic practice allows her to inform her performance in any genre with improvisational elements drawn from a multitude of sources.

We understand and accept the improvisational musicians' assumption that they are setting out to work unscripted. The art form depends on quick wits, fine technique, highly attuned perceptions, broad knowledge of musical history, and the sort of soaring invention possible only when these elements are in place. In music performance (as in acting), improvisation is a rigorous discipline that is learned through much study and practice. Those of us in the audience delight in the apparent ease and naturalness, the hallmarks of a demanding art discipline.

Part of the contract in performance art is that we, the audience, applaud from joy the stagings that performers produce for us. Their pleasure in their performances must be quite different from our own—how can we inhabit their thrills of mastery, of camaraderie, of goals fulfilled? But surely they work for our applause. Audiences count to performers, as their work does to us.  Performers wish to persuade audiences; to make a difference to us. But even in doing so, they cannot necessarily control how they do. Whatever performers consider their art to be, and however they strive to fashion it, its impact can be serendipitous.

This weekend I attended several dances at an evening of OhioDance 2013 performances held at BalletMet Performance Space in Columbus. Despite the tech rehearsals of the afternoon, the tech delivery was disastrous to two dances I saw. In the first, three  game performers continued to dance their lively drama through long periods of silence where their recorded music was to have been. It was another, though, that set me thinking about improvisation, its relation to will or necessity; to artist and audience.

The piece was Retracing, coreographed by Kora Radella of Double-Edge Dance, with music by Ross Feller. The mysterious music was performed live by violinist Dorothy Martirano, with occasional whisperings of recorded music behind her (she was to have been playing against recorded sound). There was some obvious, significant glitch at the beginning as Martirano and dancer Julie Brodie coordinated the beginning of the dance; but once the event was underway, I was mesmerized.

Visually, the dance was a beautiful integration of movement, costume, and raked light. The fragile-framed Brodie was first dressed in a layered dress of coarsely-woven, bleach-white, diaphanous cotton or linen. With her curly brown hair in a short, pixie cut, she appeared her appearance was every bit the gamine. Her movement was restricted—leased, even—by a tether, yards and yards long, that was wrapped several times around her body and extended for all the way across the stage, where a black-garbed handler controlled its length and tension; the degree of freedom available to the dancer was thus bound by it.

I was mesmerized by the girlish femininity of the dancer in her sweet layers of white skirts, so innocent at the opening, but learning to examine, dance with, then against, her tether. The growing consciousness of and exploration of its meaning was acted out with such subtly choreographed nuances of movement that the drama was lucid, but took the viewer well beyond obvious thoughts about "casting off feminine chains." Through gestures like both children and Furies, the dancer rejected, longed for, and mourned her tether. Not only was the dance beautifully conceived and danced with distinction, but its content was significant and haunting. I was deeply moved by an experience that held me rapt.

I had the privilege of speaking with Martirano, Feller and briefly with Radella afterwards. They were not happy, for there had been big disruptions to the plan. Most of the recording hadn't been played at all, so Martirano and Brodie had had to wing it. I hadn't perceived this at all, though, however upset the artists were, or how angry and frustrated they felt. They had been robbed; I had not. For them, the necessity of improvising had been a sudden burden; for me, it had been, if I'd known they were doing it, something like the Tone Road Ramblers do—using their knowledge and skills to create spontaneously within parameters they know well.

The force of expectations! Often it's the audience that declares success or failure depending on what it expects. We judge art by what we've come to anticipate, based on everything else we've seen or heard. That has to happen among artists who plan works too, who know what is supposed to occur. They, especially, don't want surprises.

 I love the experience of art to be an exercise in being where we are, traveling through time and thought from the moment we're given. What greater show of power than improvisation, especially when it's quite unexpected on both sides of the curtain. That performance of Retracing on Saturday was, perhaps, the best one yet.

Atul Dodiya: Shutters Between Us

Although Atul Dodiya is one of India's preeminent contemporary artists, he is not well-known in the United States. The Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati has mounted his first solo museum show in the States (through May 7). It is very special and makes me look forward to a future in which his path and mine will cross again.

Atul Dodiya, 26/11,2012. Enamel paint on motorize
roller shutter with iron hooks. Exterior, 108 x 72."

The work Dodiya shows at CAC is a series of actual, mechanically operated, shuttered shop doors collected from Mumbai. The works consist of paintings on the doors—scenes of the outer world, of the street, merchandise, references to world affairs—and painting on the "walls" too, revealed once the doors are lifted so that we can look beyond. Behind the doors are private areas where individuals reflect on the events of the world, experience the night in safety, move in psychic space and time, away from the clutter of the immediate.

Atul Dodiya, 26/11,2012. Oil, acrylic with marble dust,
and oil stick on canvas. 82.25 x 61.5."

There's a basic element of play in this show. The visitor cannot experience these works without lifting and lowering the big shuttered doors, thus causing them to rumble loudly up and down their tracks. It's impossible to be furtive in the gallery: Attention is called to the presence of every viewer. Most of us pass through galleries silently as ghosts. Here, we come as foreign travelers to a market square, seeking—what? Exotica? Souvenirs? Cultural experience? Or our own familiar hearts, differently accented?

Dodiya's shutters place viewers in specific locations. We viewers can feel like the owners of the shops whose doors we open. We can be tourists or outright voyeurs, peeking illicitly behind shutters into the intimate quarters or bared souls. We may begin, at least, with our feet and minds placed on the dusty, ordinary street, but Dodiya's doors lift onto worlds we are surprised to face.

On the shutter of 26/11 appears a street art version of Edvard Munch's The Scream, incongruously topped with the logo of Bombay's Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, lettered in 19th-century, Victorian era characters. Behind the shutter, a man sits in a yoga pose that opens his chest. He exhales to cleanse his breath. The exhalation circumscribes and defines a whole world, including a boat with full sails skimming the ocean (near his feet).

 26/11 is the date (day and month in 2008) of India's "9/11," when Pakistani terrorists arrived by sea to attack several major sites of Mumbai, the enormous, elegant Taj Mahal Palace Hotel being most memorable among them—certainly most prominent in press images that hit this shore. Over 150 people were shot dead and several hundred more were seriously wounded during the terrible attacks of three days' duration. 

By invoking the Munch image as public response to the terrorism, it seems to me that Dodiya uses it as a universal icon of horror and grief. I don't really register it as "not-Asian," even against the calming breath, the opening position, and embracing gesture of the yogi. I think the greater contrasts are between the black and gray exterior with the aggressively yellow interior, and the watery horizontal strokes of black and white on the shutter, compared with the circle of fiery exhalations from the yogi. On neither the exterior nor the interior is the disaster itself figured; only mourning and attempts to achieve balance are portrayed. Evil itself, ob skene, does not appear.

Atul Dodiya, Dead Ancestors, 2012. Enamel paint on
motorized shutter roller with iron hooks. Courtesy
Vadehra Gallery.

Grief, death, and the struggle between resignation and anger appear throughout the work in this mesmerizing show. Another door along Dodiya's street is Dead Ancestors. It, too, is dark outside, and brilliant yellow inside. I'm enchanted by this exterior, which lacks any commercial markings. The head in which the shutter rolls up simply continues the nocturnal scene to provide a literally looming sky. The volume of the housing casts a deep shadow over the top of the shutter itself, to enhanced nocturnal effect. 

The great moon illuminates and brightens the figures in the warm night below. Dodiya has painted the night atmosphere not black and gray as in 26/11, but a warmer, brownish-gray. Against this, the pure white (not ghostly-white) figures act. All appear to be elderly, the prone figure perhaps near death, as a friend helps arrange his body. Is it a tree sprouting from his heart chakra? He is giving rise to new spiritual growth, if not to new flesh. As a scene of a past generation, this isn't a scene of death per se;  it is not lonely or anxious, but comfortable, warm, and kind.

Atul Dodiya, Dead Ancestors, 2012. Oil, acrylic, marble
dust and oil stick on canvas. Courtesy Vadehra Gallery.

If the shutter portrays the ancestors plying a world beyond this one, the interior painting perhaps brings us back to this side of death, where a faceless corpse is laid out flat, looking a death's-head skull in the face (as it were). The skull is propped against a delicately-pink, erect phallus. Unlike the skull and the body, it is represented with some natural detail, like the botanical profiles, which appear to have been hand-printed onto the canvas. Hindus worship the lingam, Shiva's phallus and life-force, which is represented as a column, not with this literal tilt. So, while this corpse is laid out between two planes, he would seem to be placed between two worlds in a couple of ways. The lingam here is a literally generative penis, not a sacred Hindu symbol; and the prone body may be ready for Western-style internment in the earth of the sprouting plants, or for the Hindu pyre that will produce the gray sky and smoke over the sun.
As in 26/11, this work seems to present Indian concepts in suspension between ancient ways and the Western ways that came with the Raj.

Atul Dodiya, Leopold, 2012. Enamel paint on motorized shutter roller
with iron hooks. Courtesy Vadehra Gallery

Leopold seems to take its name from a popular Mumbai eatery located near the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. It's purported menu and its emblematic juicy roasts suggest that it caters to an international clientele—or, at least, that it does not serve vegetarians exclusively. Each slat of the door on this stall features the name of a dish offered here, with its price. The silhouetted man is a mystery to me, but he seems, like so much in this and the surrounding works, to suggest the West before the East. His modesty is not maintained by a dhoti loincloth, but by the Biblical fig leaf, and his nose reaches the length of Pinocchio's. 

Atul Dodiya, Leopold, 2012. Acrylic with marble dust,
watercolor, and oil stick. Courtesy of
Vadehra Gallery.

The menu seems to offer Indian comfort food preparations of lots of red meat and organs, which can be accompanied by the ubiquitous Western delights of fries and soft drinks. Once more, the Indian forms hold largely Western content. This idea is bitterly underscored when the screen goes up to reveal a listing of vernacular dishes served in Mumbai's restaurants whose names you'll find heavily starred in Zagat's guide. Behind the menu selections, big rats run up and down a river of offal
and a skeletal human—unnervingly closely related to the corpse of Dead Ancestors—takes notes in some infernal book. "...It's breakfast time...in and around Bombay—up and down the whole hungry longitude in fact...if I'm not mistaken," the artist writes. To work with contrasts this broad—between rich and poor, developed and developing countries, imperialist cultures and the ones too long subject—is to work where it is all too easy to make the contrasts seem less significant than merely gross or simplistic. Dodiya's combination of shocking image and understated text in Leopold shows him completely up to ironic contrast that appears to constitute a central challenge of his work.

Dodiya is a brilliant painter, a point that I had to return several times to the front of my mind. Presenting dramas that appear in two acts, on both sides of the shutter, allows us to think of his painting first as a medium for storytelling—or emotional narrative—and to neglect the mastery and beauty of his artistry  on metal and on canvas both. The shutters are often painted with watery, soft effects, evocative of memory or the distance of neglect or abandonment. (It's worth noting, too, that because the shutters are in constant real operation, their paint is literally softened and worn by their service: Note the gray stripes of wear along the left margin on this example.) 

Inside, the canvases have very different affects. He uses contrasts of sharp edges and bleeding ones; acid yellow against black; matte and gloss, and so on. His canvases are intense and taut. Even when they are not easy to interpret or are frightening, they are forceful as grappling hooks. They are difficult to detach from.

Atul Dodiya, Farewell, 2012. Exterior: Enamel paint on
motorized metal roller shutter with iron hooks. Interior: Oil,
acrylic with marble dust, oil stick on canvas. Courtesy of
Vadehra Gallery.

 
This view of Farewell, partially opened, demonstrates well Dodiya's brilliance at mingling several styles of painting—the liquid arabesque of vine leaves on the door; the highly textured gray skeletal form floating on the yellow ground; the dynamic, rough-edged, yet elegant black abstract shapes that sit like massively enlarged elements of language—perhaps forms borrowed from Devanagari, the writing system of Hindi. 
















When I speculate about abstract likenesses to the shapes of Devanagari, I am of course, in one obvious sense skating on pretty thin ice. It's impossible for me—and surely for many Americans—to see Dodiya's work without being exceedingly aware how ignorant I am of Indian culture, Indian contemporary art, or even of the little bit I do to keep up with political and economic news of the subcontinent. Do I come to a show only as a tourist?

I'll readily admit to being a tourist in the sense of taking a visit to a foreign sensibility, a foreign culture, and a whole new world of references. This world calls on my imagination in  new and deeper ways than other shows I see of work by American and European artists. Being colonized in one's own home? I may not know it politically but I can relate to that through individual experience and emotion. Discrepancies of economic class and the erosion of society as a result? This undoubtedly comes in different flavors, but it's not unknown to me or other Western viewers. In short, where there are humans in the audience, connections will be made across cultures.

It also struck me vividly when I saw this show that I tend to think of experiencing art through information and ideas gleaned from my past experience. When it comes to engagement with this art from contemporary India, about which I know little, this art connects to my future experience. That is, Atul Dodiya's work has created a node of reference for me to which I will be comparing new experiences, adding information; around which I'll be expanding and creating my world of reference. Dodiya's work extends my sphere of art generally. But this is South Asian contemporary art for the present. It has me looking forward to new, unknown art engagements, rather than leaving me as usual, comparing my Now to Then.


All photography by the author.