Taming Chance

There is a painter friend of mine who has gone all abstract. (read nuts) He has strength, but he is not a strong painter, according to me. He is aware that I don't particularly like his kind of work: it is serendipitous.Not that it does not work, only I tend to see almost nothing of the man in his work. Besides, he has a scattered sort of continuity to his work. One of his works in room A, for instance, could be quite removed from another of his in room B. Nothing wrong with that , I know, but it leaves me with a unfulfilled sense of that something which is so vital to the seeing of art.

But these are times when absence of virtue in a painter can be convincingly proposed as his very quality. In other words, a chap who can not draw puts up his bad work as his original 'style'! (reminds me of a remark this same abstraction-ist had made regarding someone who could not draw. "...forget a straight line, but he can not draw even a crooked one" He'd said. Made me laugh that, but all this is besides the point.) The point I am making here is that there are artists who follow their experience with admirable honesty, "with a dangerous disregard for money", yet there are others who chance upon something that works once, and since it worked for them once, they capitalize on it and make it part of their natural repertoire. Taming chance is what I call it. Chance was an important part of a certain phase of Dada, the art movement. Arp and others used this gimmick to make a statement. Up-till there it is acceptable to me because Dadas and the Surrealists were exploring possibilities of language. Besides, their manifesto justified the Gimmick. My abstraction-ist friend's case however is, personally, unacceptable. This man has indeed taken up the entire field of abstraction - Gorky, Man Ray, De Kooning,Kandinsky, Hartung, Gaitonde, Raza, Kolte - they are all there in some corner of his work, along with other marks and dents - and is freaking out a free-for-all-dance in that huge ball-room called ABSTRACT ART. There is no appraisal, no self doubt, no analysis. The only thing that matters is whether he can sell or not. He sells, and going by his telling, he sells quite some. He seems happy and confident. That is what matters in the final analysis, for at the end of even the most selfish act on the part of man, he should be happy. Otherwise, what the hell. *** A crow lay her egg in a kite's nest. The eggs hatched and a crow among kites was born. Little did he know of his origin, his identity. He was happy and hunted and grew up with kites. He even learned to soar high up in the sky and on spotting a prey could swoop down upon it quite like a kite. It was a time when there were no mirrors. But one day the crow and his sibling kites were made aware of their identities. It was a fox, let's say, in keeping with the tradition of tale-telling, who told them of their difference. They did not believe the fox, but agreed to follow it to a lake to see their reflection in the clear water. One by one they sat on the rock in the mid stream and each looked at his image in the water. Each one found nothing wrong. They were feathered brothers of a feather. The fox realised that unless they compared each with the other, the difference would not be noticed. It wanted to make them all look at once at the images of each other, so it asked them to fly some distance right above the water and plunge . "look," it said, "at your image as you fall. Look at your bodies and the crow's." The birds did as they were told and noticed that the crow was very different indeed from the rest of them.

The story above can take a turn in any direction: Propaganda is like that. It sees reality as a coin with two sides. The flipping of it is not left to chance, but to a careful appraisal of social or political climate. Motive determines the presentation of art as ART or saleable art object. When latest research in particle physics suggests an implicit subjectivity present in matter, who is to say what is what? But then, why define and categorize, set aside and compartmentalize? The need in the mind to deduce seems to be losing its hold on things. Or is it? The utility of this seems to me to come to an agreement in order to share our common heritage, simply for the joy of living together. May be man has come full circle with his mental approach. May be he needs another tool of inquiry, for it seems the age of reason is coming to an end. May be we also need a new field to inquire into. Spirituo-materialism may be? Or materiospirituality? For that we will need something else, not mind, but perhaps, Supermind. Till that happens unlimited abstraction has a life-line,. May it live long and my friend too, who is quite a likeable chap. Only, I wish he made his point a little less aggressively.