[Reader-list] understanding Duchamp,Chinmastka in the present

[inder salim]

 Kab say hoon, kaya batavoon, Jahanay Kharab mein,
Shab hai, Hijr ko bi rakhoon ghar hisaab mein,

The above couplet by Ghalib roughly means that ' words are despotic
and empty'. I was also quoting Michel Foucalt. And after few more
lines he talks about 'madness', which has some possibility to give us
an insight about 'the mind', or else it is directly: 'the death'. It
was few years back. I knew about this, a little, and about Chinmastaka
painting, and about Duchamp's ' the bride… ), but it was few days back
that a random surfing on the net I discovered the amazing variation of
Chinmastka painting that I am trying to reconnect; this time a little
more profoundly than before.

Even Ghalib admits : that even if I manage to write about the
separation, the pain,  the night, still I can't say what I am ?  So
let alone this piece by poor inder salim.

This particular Chinmastka, the miniature, ( collection Robin Musem of
Art, New York ) shows a flame tilted towards left. see image:
<http://indersalim.livejouirnal.com>.  Two friends on two stones, with
a rivulet in between. ( one of them almost looking into the eyes of
onlooker, i.e. us ) Each drop of water flowing within a thought
(form), each stroke in orange and red coming towards us like heat of a
flame, although going elsewhere and up. Is it the illusion of a
chitta, a corpse on the burning pyre?  Is it the illusion that she is
too  explicitly celebrating the ritual of love?  Though, what I see is
She, once hidden inside his body, but is there anybody alive in the
flame. The two are in discourse, and there are two on the pyre as
well. Broadly speaking, the energy/shakti is free, and that is the
main spectacle in the land space.

It is easy to identity the corpse: Mahesha himself, and Parvati
herself as flame, the Shakti. But that is the lower half of the
painting. The upper half is death, in comparison to life which
manifests the lower half of the image.  A strange double of the
shakti, releasing itself from the shakti underneath who is seen
amputating her own head, which is akin to the sudden end of  the
tilted flame against the green of the land scape. The visible part of
the flame can not go beyond, but the energy can go. The released flame
has its own blues and blacks which drink the blood, perhaps to
reinforce the shakti to a free flowing upward flight. The flame, once
hidden in the wood ( of the landscape )  is coming out finally. There
is no death, but death is celebrating itself!

In this sense, sheer eroticism is merely a west-oriented word; and is
quite explicitly visible in the lower half of the chinmastka itself.
The Indian mythology has successfully blended sexuality, spirituality
and death through such celebration of life which is quite unlike to
occidental understanding of life.   It is through the example of this
master miniature that we have can makes a square of the understanding
of the life and death. This understanding as per the ancient Indian
thought structures reveals also that only a God and Goddess union can
be put on the pyre to comprehend the life: death.  Since one can not
experience death in such a way that one can come back to life and
reveal it too, so an impossibility to understand death.  Since We cant
understand death, there is an automatic impediment to a real
understanding of life even. It is almost like what Physicists say, '
since we don't know about the true nature of a particle how can  claim
to know anything about the cosmos.'

Again, in the image, the Buddha, like a decorated  wisdom piece
decorated  is once again seated on the fragment of the released
Shakti/energy of this understanding of the death and life.

Perhaps, because of this universal impossibility to understand death,
Duchamp wrote his own Epitaph which reads: 'Any way, it is always the
other guy who dies'.  So, to be the other or not to be the other is
the question…

The 'other' is debated all over the post modern text, and for obvious
reasons. The issues of environment, war and misery are paramount to
this word 'other'. But, we all know how difficult it is to negotiate
this word. We all know, how unpredictable is the nature of this word '
other' and how rapidly it betrays any definition that does not match
its capacity to recede. It is perhaps our destiny to disappear at the
horizon of our pursuits to know the ' the self' through ' the other'.

No one can say whether Duchamp  had  any  idea of  this 'chinmastka'
before he began to work out his ambitious project ' the bride stripped
bare by her bachelors, even'. Octavio Paz once observed that if there
is anything in the world  which balances this particular  master piece
by Duchamp it is  this Chinmastake.  What Duchamp wrote in his notes
on the said work is wonderfully animated in
www.understandingduchamp.com

Images uploaded in
http://www.himalayanart.org/search/set.cfm?setID=179 show us a whole
lot of imagery of that time and what sensibility and thought artists
achieved during those times.
In most of works the gods are literally without garments on their
bodies. True, there is  no meaning of garments whenever it comes to a
discourse on death. But that is half truth, because we need to put
something on the surface to  understand the illusion. So in terms of
meaning, a poetic/surrealistic imagery can give us something in
comparison to something which we feel is logical or rational. Do I
sound too irrational ?

Artists have done such works in the past to understand this profound
liaison between sexuality and death, and even in the present there
have been artists in the west, besides Duchamp who have intuitively
mixed images of Christ with piss or other sexual imagery.

Your piss, and my piss from
Our Genitals ( created by desire)
Kiss and merge in the gutter
To experience 'god'

I am writing this all in reflection to recent controversies about
Hussain, Chandermohan  and all that besides my inner compulsion to
understand images of the past and present.
But at the same time,  I quote 'I fear we are not getting rid of God
because we still believe in grammar.' Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.


What art and literature in the past achieved  is monumental, but the
aesthetic value judgment of our times has changed with the change of
times. The thought values of the great Himalayan minature  got somehow
stuck in the aesthetic of times. (see Grammer ) Duchamp's own work '
the fountain' popularly known as 'the urinal' was meant to deconstruct
the aesthetic norm of his times, but that too got appropriated by
aesthetic of times, and Duchamp was disappointed by the way the urinal
was interpreted or seen as merely a readymade art piece.

Times have indeed changed and so shall we. We have to change the
tract, says Derrida.  Bashir Baddar, a great urdu poet, observes quite
lucidly that a forest fire seen from a distance might have looked
beautiful once, but that was then, not now any more. Maurice Blanchot
in his book ' THE BOOK TO COME' talks lucidly about the fact that
times are such a poem can not take place.  But in other chapter he
points out that whenever we felt that all the master pieces have
happened, and there is no possibility to happen, something happens at
the same time.  In this book and other good books I found that there
is an  impossibility to talk about  art and literature without the
mention of writers like Kafka, Jenet, Gide, and here we also feel that
whatever religion one may belong to, it is inevitable to talk about
saint/poets like Kabir, Meera, Sarmad…

So, there is a future… only if we know how to write a new poem. The
knowledge of medium, talent, and other such tools is immaterial, since
the times have changed from art to life.

Coming back to the miniature 'chinmastka' , may be it is not so
interesting to many, and that is quite normal, ( see grammer-less-ness
) but I began to talk about it because Duchamp's work ' the birde …'
is already a master piece in the western world and to connect this
with that was also one important step ( begun by O. Paz ) towards the
understanding  of art, and not understanding west-art only.

That is that, which looks quite trivial in comparison to the universal
questions which are profoundly embedded in the words like 'life' and
'death'. I guess, I hope I have not  grossly slipped over to something
else, but I believe, that there is a way to return back to the very
discourse if we are able to connect different things on the surface
which as vast universe itself.

to be continued ...
( even in silence )

with love
inder salim
--
http://indersalim.livejournal.com


-- 

http://indersalim.livejournal.com