Potentially Subversive
Potentially Subversive
Interview with Sheela Gowda
You began your career as a painter but since the early 1990s you have produced work using highly specific non-art materials such as cow dung. Perhaps we could speak about how this came about.
‘It was when I stopped painting. I first exhibited the work in 1993 but I had begun to experiment with cow dung in 1990. The early works were still figurative. To begin with I was using dung more as pigment, as texture, than as sculpture. I also made an installation in this exhibition consisting of stacks of cow dung pats that related back to the way it is used in India for all kinds of different purposes, so it sort of brought the work full circle. I see a familiar object in an unusual context or have a conversation or an argument with someone, hear somebody’s woes, or read the newspaper. I am not interested in illustrating a story. My “woes” begin when I try to find a language and a form in which the references and connections are there, but not in a way that a viewer gets bogged down by the need to know all of it for the work to be accessible.’
I am trying to understand your impetus to use cow dung as opposed to any other material. We can talk about the various registers of meaning that the cow dung has, but I’m curious about that moment when you realized its potential for your work.
‘That moment was a crisis with painting that I was reaching.’
Painting is shit?
[laughter] ‘No, I wouldn’t say that, but I could not go on down that familiar path anymore. I am not talking about painting in general but specifically about the way I was unable to find the means within it to translate certain strong reactions to immediate issues. I do not like to use my work as a vehicle for making strident statements, and needed subtler means. I had been living in a village while I taught at the local art college after my return from London; yet I was making oil paintings in a habitual sort of a way. Something was wrong. Cow dung is used in India as a sacred material in religious rituals, as cow dung pats for fuel, as a cover for the floor and walls and as a material for making folk sculpture and toys. The cow is also a symbol of non-violence. I liked the range of its meanings, from the sacred to shit. I had an urgent need to find a material that had something locally specific to it that would address the political debates and the angst many of us felt at that stage. Cow dung has so many links for me through family, politics, and religion. Using a material like cow dung in Switzerland, for example, would be read as being exotic; whereas in India it was a much more natural exercise, except that I am urban, not rural. I had to find a way within contemporary practice that would not make it seem as being reactionary or sentimental. When I first got the idea to work with dung I filled a sketchbook full of ideas, but they remained as exercises in thinking conceptually. It took me about two years of experimentation before something concrete emerged.’
At the time when you were developing these works in the early 1990s, there was the political rise of the Hindu right wing and a subsequent shift in India’s political and social dynamics. At the same time, internationally, artists were doing a lot of work involving specific materials with particular associations. When you were experiencing this crisis of representation and beginning to search for another material, which artists were you were looking at?
‘At that point, in terms of language, I had a greater need to cope with the disjuncture with my previous work rather than looking to other artists. It was such a drastic step for me. There were so many possible concepts out there in the familiar and the day-to-day to be investigated, potential subversive material, it kept me excited enough. For example, reading the religious ritual of the smashing of an ash gourd, into which a window has been cut: the gourd is filled with turmeric and lime which turns the inside blood-red. It is a replacement for a real sacrifice of a goat or a chicken, a soft version that still has violent origins and intentions.’
I’m interested in artists who deal with the legacies of modernism, not in its forward-looking aspect but through looking at ways of life that are being left behind in our own lifetimes, or vernacular cultures and languages that are just passing out of use. In this discussion you have been alluding to a shift between rural and urban experience.
‘I did not grow up in a rural area, but it has been a strong link through my parents. My father was a writer and a folklorist who put together a substantial collection of folk music and artefacts from this region. He organized folk events and performances and therefore I am familiar with it since my childhood.’
I also think it is important to consider your work not just in relation to India but to other histories of art. When you talk about specific materials, I think of the legacies of minimalism and its shift from artists using oil paint, steeped in history, to the use of materials that had contemporary social reference points. There is also a serial logic in some of your works, where individual elements operate as integers – similar objects placed next to each other in series. These are ideas that can also be associated with minimalism.
‘It is strange the way this has come about, because I am not overly interested in minimalism as such. It didn’t really fascinate me nor did I particularly want my work to go in that direction, I mean in terms of its manifesto and so on.’
What about your work with needles and thread? When my mother taught me to sew a button she taught me to take the thread through the needle to the point where it was doubled up. It was efficient because each stitch was effectively doubled. So for me your process has that kind of association with domestic labour that is based in pragmatics.
‘I had this vision of doing a work with thread and needles, hung down as a column, so that the thread defined a form and an area of colour while the needles appeared as a band of steel. I tried to execute this but it was impossible to keep it in place as a column. So, I anointed them with kumkum paste and pulled them together. It became a rope, a sculptural line. But what is important for me is that these needles are not just attached to the tip but they have passed through the whole thread. If I encountered even one knot, I would reject the entire ball of thread. The threads were then brought together to make a rope. The rope is not just a form but it is also a process. Once I had the rope, I could do anything with it. I could draw with it; I could sculpt with it. There is a very insidious sort of violence in this piece, the needles hang at the end almost passively but they have a potential for hurting.’
Drawing is obviously very important for you. Even in your early paintings, it is clear that the pictorial solutions you evolve are linear ones.
‘Linear and drawn, drawing the painting. For me the line in a painting abstracts the surface.’
So, when you do an installation with thread and needles, it is a continuation of this linear obsession.
‘The room becomes that volume of space at the same time…the hard surface.’
Your work with incense also appears to be a form of material drawing.
‘I make the incense myself by kneading the ingredients, which are tree bark powder and charcoal powder. I can make them in a range of shapes and sizes. I began making ropes with it by using a string instead of a stick, which is conventionally used to make incense sticks. In this way I could make an endless line that could go on burning, leaving behind endless brownish grey ash.
The work is extremely fugitive.
‘I set a piece of incense alight; as it burns it leaves behind the ash in the shape in which it was made. It often has some nice surprises, such as spider web patterns and other strange ways that ash forms. It burns very insidiously. For me this is very important because the work is about time.’
How long does it take you to produce such a work?
‘It depends, but probably one or two days. I overlap the pieces a bit, or more often I use a small piece like a bridge. If I want to stop the burning process, I don’t put on a bridge and the piece will naturally burn out. I can light another piece whenever I want to begin again.’
And the smell?
‘I do not want smell to be a part of the work. What is important is the ash, as a burnt residue and the minimal aspect of the table and frames. Together they are in various shades of grey.’
And the design is related directly to how you laid out the pieces?
‘ Yes, how much I spread it out, how many pieces I put on a frame. I have three, two and one foot long frames, each the width of the table. They are made in slightly different depths so there is a variation in the surface height as well.’
Like a landscape?
‘Yes, only the table height is stable.’
You sometimes incorporate images in the ash ‘landscape’?
‘I made watercolours of innocuous moments, images of nature, from family photographs as well as media images. Like the ash, these watercolours were more or less monochrome. I scanned them, printed them out, and then put them under glass. So they are prints of watercolours of photographs of moments, many generations away from the initial moment of viewing. So in this sense the watercolours, like the ash, contain a trace of time.’
Although you ceased to define yourself as a painter you still continue to paint. In a way, this has allowed you work with different techniques and styles as part of a broad repertoire of material and spatial possibilities.
‘Yes, that’s right. To give an example, in recent presentations of my work I juxtapose two paintings, 2/7 (2006) and Agneepath (2006) and they read off each other, even though they are very different. The first is a realistic image made from a small newspaper photograph of protesting students from Kerala who are supported by the left party. For me, it is a funny but grim image. I used a scanned image to get an outline and then worked the detail back into it. My original interest in the image was the people, the faces, and their postures. I couldn’t see it being dealt with in any other way but as a realistic representation. Other elements emerge slowly, like the hotel in the background called Hotel Ayodhya, which echoes the name of the mosque that was demolished by the Hindu right wing in the early 1990s. The slush puddle that a protestor’s foot is being extricated from, the electric pole, and so on have potential readings within the picture. The second painting is a still from a film called Agneepath – Agnee means fire, path is path/way – which I have digitally enlarged. Therefore it is very fuzzy as a print. I am not trying to cover my tracks with the paint; we can still see that it begins as a print.’
Who is depicted here?
‘Amitabh Bachchan, he has been a top star of Hindi cinema for the last two or three decades. He is seen in this still, dying on the lap of a woman who is very much a Hindi movie mother, clad in a white khadi sari and a full-sleeved blouse. Somehow the painterliness of this image is not about whether I know how to paint, even though it was tougher for me to paint this image than the other more meticulous, realistic image.’
But there certainly had to be something about how the paint goes down…
‘Yes, in most parts I have blended into the fuzziness of the image, as it was important not to make my presence too obvious. Only the blood was made a bit dramatic; the wash of red paint plays with the physicality of the wash of blood on the shirt!’
Both the paintings also play with the idea of a grand historic painting. In Western art we would read this image as a pieta.
‘Yes, but only on the surface. In fact, this file on my computer is called pieta. But here Amitabh is no Jesus.’
What is the woman refusing?
‘That is a very important question because there are many ways one can read it. One reading is that the mother is refusing her son’s questionable martyrdom, his means.’
The two paintings are not quite two sides of the same coin…
‘Yes, they are very different. But the symbolism in these images leads to a consideration of reality and so back to the world outside.’
This is an updated version of an interview that recently was published within the scope of Gowda’s first solo show in Bose Pacia Gallery in New York. The original conversation was published in the book Sheela Gowda (Steidl and Bose Pacia Gallery, 2007). Metropolitan M’s grateful thanks to Nivedita Magar, Galleryske, Bangalore.This is an updated version of an interview that recently was published within the scope of Gowda’s first solo show in Bose Pacia Gallery in New York. The original conversation was published in the book Sheela Gowda (Steidl and Bose Pacia Gallery, 2007). Metropolitan M’s grateful thanks to Nivedita Magar, Galleryske, Bangalore.
Trevor Smith
