The Butterfly Effect

Amit Mukhopadhayay

Does the flap of a butterfly’s wing in Paris set off a tornado in New Delhi, Bhopal or Kolkata? It may. If you place a ball at the crest of a hill, it might roll into any of several valleys depending on slight differences in initial position. The butterfly effect is a phase, which encapsulates the more technical notion of sensitive dependence on initial conditions in chaos theory. Small variations of the initial conditions may produce large variations in the long-term behaviours of a system. The same may happen in art. Replace the word system with tradition, you will see that the concepts of abstraction have rolled over several centuries splitting geographical barriers. From Piet Mondrian to Gaitonde, Ramkumar, Raza and the young Partha Shaw, the tradition of abstract art lives on. This makes my task difficult. In this show we have a set of artists who do not present a coherent representation of the abstract, infact, each one of them are aesthetically different from the other. But what probably binds them together is that they do not expel the materiality of the objects completely yet, even though the fragility of their representation in almost appetiteless as if they worked with the notion of pure sublime, a peculiar cohabitation of Kant and Hegel in the court of non resident reason. If this is a broader context of the show, at least two sub-context emerge, one, the representation of Sunil Das, Yusuf, Partho and Shambhavi in which the artists do not expel the materiality of the objects completely and second, Pradip, Sheetal, Kalicharan, Kishore and Kazi’s representation forecloses the pure sublime. What intrigues me is that these artists do not move away from self referentiality, especially, the post independence artistic conventions ( a half baked artistic modernism) and without any theoretical propositions it makes reading of these works a little difficult. Let us take the example of Piet Mondrian’s works. He restricted his design to horizontals and verticals in red, blue and yellow plus black and white. He thus eliminated every possibility of representation. Yet, he titles his works as Trafalgar Square or Broadway Boogie-Woggie, that hinted at some degree of relationship with observed reality. His goal was to attain “Pure Reality” and he defined it as equilibrium “through the balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions”. Kandinsky was exactly on the other side of the river. His goal was “to draw away from, to separate” and create pure, lyrical form. Since I find traces of materiality in Sunil Das, Partho, Yusuf , Shambhavi’s works I would like to put them in the first category i.e. of Abstract Reality and Pradip Sheetal Kazi, Kalicharan and Kishore’s work in the bracket of pure, lyrical emotion. In the India context we have Raza’s ‘Bindu’ series denoting a sense of the materiality grounded within Indian Philosophical system. On the other hand there is Gaitonde who closes all referential materiality leading to the sublime. I would like to believe that all the artists who are presented in this show have not jumped the bandwagon of abstract art, it must have been their journey in search of a world they may like to imagine to be. Add an analytical rigour to their respective practices and it will open up new possibilities in our own context. But just a word of caution or two, one, remember that art as pure sublime will cause its own origin and death and secondly one flap of a seagull’s wings could change the entire life-system.