NS HARSHA UPWARD MOVEMENT
NS HARSHA UPWARD MOVEMENT
Victoria Miro
Of Journeys Great and Small Zehra Jumabhoy
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance? william butler yeats ,
‘ among
school children ’,
1928
Small things make a big difference in the series ‘Upward Movement’ by NS Harsha. Nine new canvases by the Mysore-based artist are populated by the tiniest of unlikely characters. Meet a pigtailed blonde playing an Indian musical instrument; a highkicking pony-tailed man; a blue-haired dame diligently grinding masala (a blend of spices) in a mixie, the kitchen appliance so loved by the modern Indian housewife; and a skeletal, slightly bedraggled crone milking a cow, the puddle of spilled liquid resembling the glowing threads of her halo-white hair. They may be portrayed in miniature, but collectively these people are part of a large pattern. Pale pink, baby blue, lemon-cream and peach… At first glance, Harsha’s canvases resemble bolts of cloth in a textile shop, his miniature folk apparently block-printed in mechanically manufactured designs. Take, for instance, the figures colonising Chamber Concert: positioned in a sea-green rectangle of acrylic speckled with twinkly stars, men and women are framed by black and gold stripes like the brocade borders of a saree. Each minute figure plays the veena (the plucked stringed instrument used in classical Indian music), and each one seems a carbon copy of the next. Yet, as we examine the musicians more closely, we notice that each individual is quite distinct from their neighbour, and harbours an attitude all their own: a saree-clad blonde hugs her instrument protectively, while a black-moustached man appears to scowl as if made grumpy by his veena. A similar oscillation between similarity and difference occurs in Time and Again Upward Movement Beautiful Beautiful. Here, men and women enact the same gesture from classical Indian dance – an evocation of what Harsha terms a
‘reaching for the cosmos’. The repetitive, ritual actions ricocheting over the canvas, and the virtually identical costumes worn by the figures, almost succeed in disguising the diverse desires of the dancers. Then again, looking at the details, we notice that while a blue-skinned sãdhu (holy man) blissfully grazes star-spangled clouds with his toes, an athletic gent, sporting a goatee, seems more intent on physical fitness than celestial communication. It is significant that Harsha’s dances between the part and the whole are bound up with the metaphor of music. He confesses that he enjoys visiting local concerts of Carnatic music, a system of melodies that reached its zenith in South India during the reigns of the Kings of Mysore in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Indian classical music or rãgas are associated with different times of the day or the changing seasons. Tellingly, a rãga (the term translates simultaneously as ‘hue’, ‘colour’, ‘beauty’ and ‘melody’) is composed of a series of five or more repeated notes, yet it is how the notes are interpreted by the skilful musician that makes the melody. In other words, the notes are never exactly identical even as they recur. Harsha’s enthusiasm for this paradox perhaps explains his growing interest in antique East Asian panoramas: in these ancient landscapes no individual brushstroke is ever entirely identical to or distinct from another. Tellingly, references to rock formations in traditional Japanese landscapes and clouds gleaned from Chinese brush painting pop up throughout, and often unexpectedly, in Harsha’s current series. Notice the upward-pointing golden monkeys jumping over the scriptural stones in Raha Dikhanaywalay Thay Hai Rahengay (Path Showers Were/Are/Will Be There). Or the banked masses of black-grey cloud, like swirls of Chinese ink, that hover above the dancers in Time and Again Upward Movement Beautiful Beautiful. Harsha’s paintings echo, too, the tendency of Sino-Japanese panoramas to make the smallest marks serve as a gateway to vast vistas, which are simultaneously both more and less than the sum of their parts. ‘Upward Movement’ is concerned with a tension that runs parallel to these formal concerns, examining how the quest for personal fulfilment battles and converges with our need to blend in according to societal expectations. The ambiguous impulse to camouflage is explored in Peep Chirp Peep Chirp…, in which dozens of tiny people (all garbed in parrot-green suits with red beaks) adopt similar poses to look through
microscopes or telescopes. Harsha refers to this peculiar conference of birds as an ‘assembly line of eureka moments’. As parrots are famous for imitation, for Harsha even the search for scientific ‘enlightenment’ is painted (and tainted) with our yearning for mimicry. And as we look more closely, the parrot-people seem increasingly sinister. Are their ‘beaks’ actually gas masks? Yet where we expect violence, we find peace. In Mooing Here and Now, a man clad like a Taliban militant shoots a dart from a Kalashnikov rifle. But if we follow the trajectory of the shot, we witness it piercing the flank of an angry elephant that is about to attack a cow. The supposed Muslim militant saves the life of Hinduism’s most sacred beast. So, Harsha’s figures may seem to stand alone, isolated in pools of paint, but they nevertheless communicate across socio-cultural borders. As if fleshing out this tendency, Harsha’s characters migrate from one painting to another and his signature forms traverse distances. For instance, the veena players of Chamber Concert find their way into the ornithological maze of Peep Chirp Peep Chirp…. And what of the black brushstrokes of paint, studded with planets, that hover between the spice grinders of In Search of Masala of the Universe? These inky patterns, with their partly hidden gems, are miniature versions of Punarapi Jananam Punarapi Maranam (Again Birth, Again Death), the 2013 twenty-four-metre wide curly-wurly painting which Harsha most recently presented at ‘Whorled Explorations’, the 2014 Kochi-Muziris Biennale. The monkey-folk of Path Showers Were/Are/Will Be There are familiar too: their relative also made an appearance in Kochi, this time in the guise of Matter, a bronze sculpture of a know-it-all langur monkey who clutches a globe-contoured stone and points at the sky. These travelling motifs follow both literally and figuratively in the footsteps of the globetrotting Harsha himself. The artist discloses that the black border of Chamber Concert conceals his own footprints – he walked across its edges before the paint had dried. As he confesses: I love to walk on my paintings. Every painting is a barefoot journey […] In India – especially the south – when you go into a temple, you remove your shoes. It is about piousness, the one place where you are not disguised. In many local cultural rituals and practices removing footwear is a form of being directly connected to the earth, being one with it. And when we are listening to amazing music, we shut our eyes to absorb it. I really love the journey we make in the darkness.
Is it significant that all of Harsha’s fabricated men and maidens are divested of shoes too? Other than Aristotle, that is, who makes an appearance alongside Plato and the Hindu Creator-God Brahma (sporting three heads) on the extreme right of Time and Again Upward Movement Beautiful Beautiful. Aristotle, Harsha humorously points out, is wearing sandals. Why? ‘Because I was interested in how Aristotle brings the cosmos down to earth, so it is appropriate for him to wear chappals.’ Barefooted Plato, thanks to his obscurely abstract Theory of Forms, is not accorded a similar privilege. In Harsha’s painterly sojourns the high-minded is often intimately enmeshed with lowly concerns. In Only Way is through Milking Way, Harsha’s own white footprints are more clearly interspersed with cows and the people vigorously engaged in milking them. And the bovine beasts in Mooing Here and Now will not move to greener pastures, but on the contrary are the subject of unpleasant scientific experiments: see the milk spraying out of a rose-garlanded grey cow? She might represent the sacred Mother Goddess (or Ma) in Hinduism, but this doesn’t rescue her from becoming experimental fodder for farmers. Harsha reveals that these images are based on his various visits to industrialised dairy farms in Germany and Mysore. Just as we think human beings might have discovered the path to the ‘milky’ heavens in Harsha’s painted universe, the artist reminds us that ‘the only way is through milking way’; that is, through monetisation. We are brought down to earth with a thump – or should I say a ‘moo’? Which leads us to wonder: to what does the ‘upward movement’ of the exhibition title refer? Is it a nod to the commercial gains of India’s burgeoning middle class? The mini-maidens who are In Search of Masala of the Universe – with their gleaming mixie masala grinders – might think so. Or is Harsha alluding to the global quest for spiritual advancement? South India’s temples are flooded with tourists seeking enlightenment and Mysore is home to a multi-national yoga industry. Predictably then, in Time and Again Upward Movement Beautiful Beautiful, a stylish redheaded damsel practises a complicated yogic dance move, mimicking the Preserver God Vishnu’s pose as it has been reproduced in many a classical statue and Deccani miniature. Does material acquisition preclude spiritual advancement? As we look at the diligent damsels who seek the spices of the heavens in what Harsha laughingly dubs his ‘Mother Goddess painting’, we wonder if knowledge and affluence are at the
very least not unconnected: as one prim saree -wearing house-frau clutches her shiny mixie, another leans over to lecture her companion on how to use her microscope. Harsha reminds us that in South India women continue to reign supreme: ‘It is quite common to see the women in my family using the mixie in the morning, but going off to the science lab to conduct experiments in the afternoon.’ After all, the south of India was historically a matriarchal society – unlike the macho North. In Harsha’s pastel-tinted world, scientific progress and domesticity walk hand in hand. But, what of otherworldly accomplishments? Perhaps the answer lies in Being Without. This painting, the last in the series to be completed, marks what Harsha labels a new direction in his work and in many ways serves as a counterpoint to its predecessors. While the other paintings are fitted with narratives, the artist observes – filled with ‘people milking cows, jumping into the cosmos, playing the veena’ – in Being Without ‘we have just individual figures doing nothing. Is ‘doing’ an action in itself?’ The challenge here lies in imbuing hundreds of figures with individuality while also presenting them as part of a multitude. ‘What’, Harsha asks, ‘does the idea of the “portrait” mean in this context?’ Is a crowd a community of souls? Or, indeed, is it something more isolating? In contrast to the interactions that characterise the other paintings, the fine gilt lines that run across this pale canvas separate one row of people from the next, and each diminutive figure seems to sit alone. This solitude is highlighted by a blank space in one of the rows of figures – in the artist’s enigmatic words, this creates a ‘portrait of absence’ in the midst of so many unique souls. Absence speaks louder than words, haunts longer than music… As viewers, we feel strangely compelled to take our place, to insert ourselves into the blank areas of space. Then again, as if to counteract this echoing emptiness the hand of the artist has left its comforting mark in the wavering thickness of the golden lines. Harsha explains that his glittering, hand-drawn dividers are inspired by the embossing technique used in traditional Mysore miniature painting. ‘Being without can be a beautiful state of mind,’ he suggests. However, as we follow the silent gaze of the painted people, we may ponder: are they sad or satisfied? To misquote the daffodil-seeking Wordsworth himself, perhaps the dreamers are ‘lonely in a crowd’? Are they gazing reverently at the sky or just hoping to catch the eye of a fellow solitary traveller…?
In Search of Masala of the Universe, 2015 Acrylic on canvas 190 x 150 cm 74 3/4 x 59 1/8 in
Chamber Concert, 2014 Acrylic and gold foil on canvas 190 x 150 cm 74 3/4 x 59 1/8 in
Peep Chirp Peep Chirp..., 2014 Acrylic on canvas 190 x 150 cm 74 3/4 x 59 1/8 in
Time and Again Upward Movement Beautiful Beautiful, 2014 Acrylic and gold foil on canvas 190 x 150 cm 74 3/4 x 59 1/8 in
Being Without, 2015 Acrylic and gold foil on canvas 190 x 150 cm 74 3/4 x 59 1/8 in
Raha Dikhanaywalay Thay Hai Rahengay (Path Showers Were/Are/Will Be There), 2013 Acrylic on canvas 190 x 150 cm 74 3/4 x 59 1/8 in
Mooing Here and Now, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 190 x 150 cm 74 3/4 x 59 1/8 in
Only Way Is through Milking Way, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 190 x 150 cm 74 3/4 x 59 1/8 in
Why, 2014 Acrylic on canvas 61 x 86 cm 24
1/8
x 33 7/8 in
Artist’s acknowledgements My personal thanks – B L Mahesh, Vijaykumar C S, Satyananda B and Ashwin
Published on the occasion of the exhibition NS Harsha
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Upward Movement
27 March - 25 April 2015 Victoria Miro Mayfair · 14 St George Street · London W1S 1FE
Text by Zehra Jumabhoy Design by Martin Lovelock Images: All works © NS Harsha All images courtesy the Artist and Victoria Miro, London Photography by Mallikarjun Katakol Being Without (pp. 29-31) and portrait photography by Indranil Choudhury Printed and bound by PUSH Published by Victoria Miro 2015 ISBN 978 0 9927092 8 0 © Victoria Miro All rights reserved. No part of this book should be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording or information storage or retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
Victoria Miro 14 St George Street London W1S 1FE