SEMINAR  BY - AJAYKUMAR

 

One of the major topics discussed in the art schools around the beginning of this century was about the contemporaneity of art teaching or the studio art courses.
Examiners who had encountered art students in the viva voce of post graduate courses might have come across several brilliant students expressing their concerns about the future of conventional practices like painting and sculpture.
They did express their anxieties because of the notion that painting and sculpture as mediums became outdated and multimedia or new media and performance art are more contemporary to practice in their time.
This confusion has been widespread among the teachers also who are teaching in the art schools, especially in the metros. Art teaching and art schools which we are addressing are generally a metro centered or urban specific phenomenon.
Historically there is only one place which was distanced from the urban centered art, from the earlier part of the 20th century i. e., Kalabhavan.
A conscious approach for a pan Indian idiom in the background of international Modernism became the ideology of Santhiniketan centered art, which later manifested into a catalistic force in art teaching of several schools and movements.
In what context this approach is valid in our art and teaching today is a different and distant question.
But considering the fact that the multiple streams of art practices and societies belong to urban, folk, tribal and rural cultures in the country, one has to adopt a democratic approach. The situation which I mentioned earlier which existed in the earlier part of the twentieth century is no more predominant today.
Art practices of painting and sculpture continue to have their living spaces and no art expression will cause the emancipation of the other.
There has to be alternatives in both art education and practice to materialise a breathing space for the existence of all kinds of sincere expressions, devoid of the discretion between high capital oriented art and the art without capital expenditure.
To a very large extent these alternatives can be formulated through art education, by using the resources in the radical streams of culture, and materials inherent and available in our own regions and societies.
I wish to mention a recent example which I came across in an art students’ workshop at the College of Fine Arts, Trissur.
In the workshop of my visiting faculty programme, the concept proposed was for of using simple materials from one’s own environment for making presentations. Directions were given that the intention of the workshop is not of assembling mixed media, or found objects, but creating a work of art in any format or scale with non-explosive materials, positively from the environment around. Here is the image of the presentation by a final year student who had done this work and brought it to the college. Earlier he had shown the drawing and told us that he was using dried banana leaves for making his image.
At that time we never expected him to do something like this. What we understand here is that though the student is not a practitioner of installation art, but he could bring the language from his experience.
We can also think about the possibilities of using materials like this from those students from the country with an agricultural background.
Similar kind of expressions can be seen in several other groups of students who used audiography and sensors along with objects from environment. Pictures 1,2,3... A batch (small group) of first year students had created climbing monkeys on a small tree with coconut shells, coir, and audio is played to create the noise of the monkeys. In another exhibit, we could hear certain abstract audio, at the moment when the onlooker passes by.
I am narrating these because the multimedia/ new media experiences are common and not a kind of unexplored area for students who belong to distantly urban or non-metro communities. A counter argument can be brought in: that Trissur is not a rural village or Kerala in total is a kind of urban/suburban habitat where information and electronic media are popular so that the new generation can easily access them.
It is also true to some extent, but I wish to elaborate this, later, in contrast to a very vibrant seminar held recently in Mumbai.
I wish to take you again to another workshop I had at NID Ahmadabad, two years ago, in their international electives. The entire campus has more than forty workshops at a time in the first two weeks of January. It is a theme-based design / workshop / teaching where invited artists/ teachers /writers/thinkers from other countries also participate.
In 2013 the theme was active ageing (thrive after 55) Bachpan after patchpan - centered around the concept of the life and contributions of people who spend a very active life as senior citizens.
I proposed a mural painting workshop by suggesting a true story which became popular through the Amir Khan show on Doordarsan.
It is about an old man from a Bihari village who started cutting a rock mountain in late 1980s and did complete a passage through the mountain to the other village, by taking twenty five years.
He had been doing this every day and finally achieved the goal to help his villagers for travelling to the other world. The workshop titled as ‘People who moved the mountains’ in which each student was asked to articulate this incident by choosing unknown personalities like this from their own environment or social space.
There were twelve PG students belonged to different disciplines. Most of them came from a background of graduation in science subjects, engineering, even M.Tech, to study various subjects like automobile design, animation, apparel design, and all sorts of design areas. Though the theme was given two weeks before the workshop none of them could identity a person from their own locality or region.
It is not because of the lack of initiative, but, because of their urban background. So I changed the theme to have personalities who are known or celebrated, who moved the mountains.
We had twelve personalities and with their life stories we began the project by making their portraits and the narrative of their life stories was stencilled in single English font. What is important to be noted here is that it is the issue of the ‘regional’ one which became the problem for the students. Pictures 4,5,6... The other issue was the choosing of the unknown personality. We had to abandon these two things and were forced to start afresh. In fact, there was only one student – an engineering graduate who had brought – Mayilamma – the anti coca cola campaign leader from Plachimada in Palakkad. These issues of the consciousness which we have on regional life or traditions, had been a problematic throughout the world of art education and practice.
The issues of the regional in the pan Indian or international context has always been a topic of interest in several biennales and also in our own history. (in fact, politicizing art and Art Education did begin only in one country: i.e., India). At the time of independent movement. Most recently there was a very significant seminar organized in the largest metropolitan city of India – Mumbai, called ‘Rethinking the Regional’ along with an exhibition at MGMA, Mumbai.
The seminar mapped multiple features of art practices from pre independence to the present comprising different styles, approaches, art schools in and around Mumbai. Konkan, Maratwada,Vidharbha, and Khandesh.
Trained in the Western academic tradition of the J. J. School of Art, Mumbai, the teachers in these schools had a significant role in the “dissemination of Art into the hinterland” has been significant, but observed in the broader perspective of the developments centered around JJ school of art.
The shift from provincial towns to the rapidly growing Mumbai has been discerned since the 1940’s and 50’s with many artists pursuing careers commensurate with their academic training or adapting to the modernist languages. ‘‘Most maintained a bond with their provincial backgrounds.
Some preferred to continue art practice in towns but kept abreast with the new trends with globalization, greater mobility and access to contemporary Art across the world. Thanks to technology, many artists from small nondescript towns had the conviction to deviate from the beaten path. Their art addressed socio-political and cultural issues, affinities with one’s roots, providing a source of inspiration. With the passage of time, boundaries between the ‘peripheral’ and ‘central’ became hazier, less demarcated but were never erased totally.”1 Though the seminar was a bilingual one and majority of the papers were in Marathi, we could make out the variety of subjects they had addressed and it will be very interesting to go through it. Part 1 Difference between Metropolitan and smaller city life is being metropolitan contemporary.
What does one’s awareness of being contemporary, or not, mean? In the era of information technology and globalization what has changed in our lives / awareness? Experience of literature theatre and social media. And section four and five deals with:- problems of Regional Artists.
Deficiencies of Regional Art schools, and deficiency in teaching Art History and concepts.
The category of creative painting and the confusion it creates.
Importance of students to leave provincial schools for central schools (Mumbai, Baroda, Delhi, Hyderabad) Higher education and ‘roots identity.
How to balance earlier regional experience and new experiences?2 Among the many positive initiatives discussed here it may be noted that there is an attempt to see the and address this along with the many issues of Higher education.
It we take a view within, it has to be noted that art education in several places exists as a part of higher education but finds itself isolated (or self-isolated) from the rest of higher education.
It is an isolation both geographical and academic.
Faculty of fine Arts, Baroda, or Kalabhavan may be the very few institutions that geographically exist within the vast worldly other university departments.
It would be absurd to hold the old modernist preoccupation that artist is a special breed and art education is altogether different from other disciplines. There are two important aspects coming in the way while considering these aspects.
The first one is that the art student is a part of the student community and he also has to be equipped with other knowledge systems which move the system. While addressing these, we have to be aware of the fact that the art students are not only existing separately but also are very backward in history, literature, theatre, and poetry, anthropology, etc., when compared to their counterparts in social sciences.
A study without being aware of the cultural streams will be impossible for an art student to move in a system where all kinds of knowledge have better significance than before.
If this is the situation inside, there are other changes taking place in the educational sector – especially in Higher education that cannot be ruled out.
In this context it is very important to note the increase of design schools and Media study schools in the past fifteen years, throughout the country.
They are also offering several subjects like graphic Design or Applied Arts which are offered in fine Art institutions.
As they have an extended syllabus for visual communication, Design, and multimedia subjects, students who choose to study visual arts in general would prefer such institutions, apart from Design and Media schools; the IITs have also already implemented product Design, Photography and animation courses.
While the Design Schools have a very compact curriculum of subjects centered around visual Arts Design, extending to four years, the media schools have a curriculum which is combined with journalism and visual media, where fine Arts, Still photography, videography, video editing, animation, and all those connected with the TV format combined together for three years in graduation.
As most of these schools have a system of having a teaching staff pattern at two levels the regular affairs of the college are managed by a small portion of teaching staff appointed by the management.
Another section of teaching has been carried out by visiting faculties.
At both levels there will be one or two experienced hands or retired professors or professionals who will be positioned and the rest will be a combination of teaching staff with minimum wages.
The growing increase in the number of Media Schools in Kerala has been very high in the past Ten years, and it is a phenomenon related to the chances of getting employment in the media sector.
Most of these are extended schools of journalism which conveniently incorporated with videography and animation.
On the other side the multi-national Animation companies have launched animation schools on a large scale.
As we all know this is basically a quantum shift which took place after the crash of animation market where most of the companies started or converted as educational institutions which provided multiple certificate courses in animation.
There, courses which vary from a starting of 75,000 per three months to two lakhs per annum, but fail to produce a single animator because it is only a course which provide initial training in picture animation and basic drawing.
Compared to this sector of media schools, the design schools are better but still have the lack of inherent objectives. Though most of them claim that they are alternative institutions or postmodern than NID, they do fail to form the academics, rather than packing frequent workshops.
It has been widely popular that students run from one workshop to the other and from one international tour to the other.
I am mentioning it because this was one of the strong points which was raised by an artist /teacher in a meeting convened to start a mega design school in Bangalore.
So to conclude this discussion I would like to go back to the 1st part of this paper. We began with the possibilities of working out alternatives in our practice and education.
Since the above mentioned phenomenon of a mixture of several practices studying together and not excelling in anything is a bondage packed in the education policies mainly centered around private enterprises. We cannot see this situation in isolation with the general trends taking place in Higher educations in the country, in the field of Engineering, Technology and medicine.
The exorbitant rise of private institutions, and universities, and their hunt for students, clearly establishes that education has already deteriorated to business and marketing.

Go Back