studio jan 31 fruit studies

GSaxena, Fruit 01, Jan 31 2011, 8"x10"

GSaxena, Fruit 02, Jan 31 2011, 8"x10"

GSaxena, Fruit 03, Jan 31 2011, 8"x10"

GSaxena, Fruit 04, Jan 31 2011, 8"x10"

studio jan 28 apple study

Gsaxena, Apple Drawing, Jan 28 2011

method

Alberto Giacometti, 1962,  Portrait of Caroline

Alice Neel, Pregnant Woman, 1971

studio jan 26 with mom

GSaxena, Mother Triptych 2009

This is for my mother. I took these pictures in 2009. I think they make a lovely triptych together. I was figuring out how to use my camera at the time and got this dragging light effect.

Also I saw a nice drawing a few days ago at the Vogel 50x50 site.

Will Barnet,  Untitled (Study for Mother and Child Reading), 1985

studio Jan 25 drawings

GSaxena, Some Drawings from Jan 21-25, 2011

Indian Art Summit 2011

Raqs Media Collective, Experimenter India

Aji V.N., Mirchandi + Steinruecke

The Indian Art Summit in Delhi took place last week with 84 galleries participating from 20 countries... whew! My mother and I attended the last one. Wish I had bought something then as a keepsake--a print or a small drawing (was probably too expensive anyway)--but the  experience had been so overwhelming. I generally have a hard time taking so much art in at one go (same problem with enormous museums). I guess most people visit the exhibition every day, covering it bit by bit.

Here are a few reviews of the exhibition: Metropolis M, Rekha Rodwittiya, Indian Art News, and By All means Necessary. The pictures are from Metropolis M's Review.

	Jitish Kallat, Chemould Prescott Road

Jitish Kallat, Chemould Prescott Road

	Krishna Murari, Gallery Alternatives

Krishna Murari, Gallery Alternatives

	Bani Abidi, Experimenter India

Bani Abidi, Experimenter India

Subodh Gupta, Nature Morte

missed a good show

I feel terrible to have missed this show of the Russian artist (born in 1953) Mikhail Karasik's artist books at the Museum Valkhof Kelfkensbos. I missed it by a day, and the museum is just a 15 minute drive away. The catalog might be nice though. The colors in these images posted by the museum are unbelievable.




Instead, this weekend, I visited three galleries here in Nijmegen, scouting places to connect with the art community and maybe have a show. It was my first experience with looking at a gallery space in that way--rather exciting. But I was also amazed by how different spaces can feel, their vibes, and how that affects the art in the space.

my grad work

Garima Saxena, The Gathering-Tiger Rice Orange Fish, 2008, 4 Channel Video Projection.

A reminder to myself about my own graduate work Tiger Rice Orange Fish-The Gathering in 2008. It was a 4 channel video projection. This is a great reminder about materiality to myself.

grad friends

Writing a bit each day is wonderful. I actually am remembering where I left my art practice. Sounds strange... but I tend to terrible forgetfulness, especially with all the geographical shifts.

I have been thinking very much of my four graduate school colleagues. They are all wonderful artists. Here is an image of the project called Smile Generator by Peter Goff who went to Malawi in 2009 on a Fulbright Grant. He has a talk today on the project: good luck to him! From what I gather in the writing, the Smile Generator was a goat. I am smiling. The other image of the sculpture is from our graduate show at the Weatherspoon. Peter always has a delicate line somewhere...

Peter Goff, Smile Generator (Eating), 2009

Peter Goff, chew-drive-comb, 2008

I think of Katie's drawings and painting all the time nowadays. She had such a light touch, and in my memory she spent her entire graduate career taming the ephemerality of space in her work--well taming it enough so she could catch an image of it, but the space it seems (inside and outside a body) will always be wild and intimate at the same time. I wanted to post her drawings too, but can't get a link to them...

Katie Claibourne, 2008 (can't find title)

Katie Claibourne, Self Portrait, 2007, oil on paper, 12 x15

Jeff has a new body of work since graduate school as well. His sculptures are an amalgamation of memory and material. Even though Jeff and I probably had vastly different childhoods, there is something about his work that makes me nostalgic for  my toys and fantasies from when I was little. I always wanted his sculpture the 'Rider' (pictured below) for myself. I wish I wasn't always moving all over, so I could carry and keep my friends' work with me. Soon perhaps...

Jeff Bell, Recent Work (Divide) (2010) wood, fabric.

Jeff Bell, Rogue Series (Rider) (2007) steel, paint.

Kelly's work just is. I remember how she even stuck feathers and sequence on her painting once--it was like a painted party! Very intelligent, honest, and colorful. Kelly's studio was right next to mine and whenever I would step in Kelly was of on some other adventure in space and form, sometimes a large painting sometimes little tiny ones. Latest from her blog post, she was gathering text into her paintings.

Kelly Queener, 2010, (can't find the title)

Kelly Queener, 2010, (can't find the title)

Have to exchange and collect my friends works soon!

catching up with art in india

Akshay 
Rathore, 
Chorpai 
2010,
 Barbed Wire,
 Milled
 Steel,
 Wood.

Something about the white elephant in the room: what are the connections and distinctions, between art from one country and another? By all mean it will take forever to figure this out, much more than one post at least. For me the countries being compared will be India, America, Nepal, and now the Netherlands.

It is clear that tendencies in art can and are differentiated by the trajectories, histories, and traditions of art and artists that emerged in a country. Room is also made for transnational influences as artist practices are informed by artists and movements from all over the world. Presently, media allows images and news to be exchanged very quickly, and museums and especially galleries have a new found reach across countries. In her article Modernity And Its Visual Response: The Last Six Decades, Shukla Sawant (artist and academician) writes about art in India and outlines the movement of Indian artists across, inside, and outside the country's boundaries after independence; 'modern', 'folk', formal, narrative, and nature influences on their work; development of new art schools, collectives, and organizations in the country, and even the relations between 'First World' and 'Third World' countries. A highly recommendable article to those interested in Indian art!

Also, in my experience, artists from India or Pakistan, for instance, might opt for a graduate education outside their birth-lands. For me (I've studied in too many places perhaps) this process of variables, exaggerated by other instabilities or subversions and choices, suggested a terrain of communication that was constantly being re-negotiated. Painting and drawing took a back seat during my graduate career because my primary concerns of the time--language, translation, communication, hospitality, and food--were most malleable in my hands when dealt in video, performance, poetry etc.

It is interesting now, how there is such a remarkable presence of artists from India (or even Pakistan or China) in the transnational art scene. I can't say too much about the subject, because I am introducing myself to it as I write these posts. On a side note, I am starting many lists in the periphery of this posts that will gather gallery paces and artist organizations from all the countries in my network.

The images in this post are from an interesting show (by Indian or Pakistani artists? ) being held at Nature Morte in Berlin. Looking at the latest contemporary art from India is an entry point to many new discourses to me. For instance the discourse of material. I really love the use of silk in the Gahlot's 'When you leave me' (pictured below)--vibrant colors and you can almost feel the luscious stuffed organs in your hands. Even the use of barb wire in Rathor's 'Chorpai' pictured above is a visceral connection between materials and experiences for those who have slept on a charpai (khat or cot) or jumped over barb wire in India. Visceral indeed!

Suchitra Gahlot, When You Leave Me, 2010, Installation in Silk, Velvet, Glass & Steel.

studio jan 19 weaving surface

For a while I forgot where the idea in these images was going... I worked on it a little more today and remembered something new. I imagine a surface woven and detailed.

Having recently focused my energies for the development of my art practice, I face the awesome question of what exactly is my practice? This has always been a rather complicated query for me, and never have I located an answer. Arjun Appadurai, a cultural studies academic who studies globalization, writes about the cultural reproduction of self or the enculturation of a family in his essay "Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy" from his book Modernity at Large (thanks to my M.Phil program for linking me to all these important writers). He says,

As families move to new locations, or as children move before older generations, or as grown sons and daughters return from time spent in strange parts of the world, family relationships can become volatile, new commodity patterns are negotiated, debts and obligations are recalibrated, and rumors and fantasies about the new settings are maneuvered into existing repertoires of knowledge and practice...

It is in this atmosphere that the invention of tradition (and of ethnicity, kinship, and other identity markers) can become slippery, as search for certainties is regularly frustrated by the fluidities of transnational communication. As a group pasts become increasingly parts of museums, exhibits, and collections, both in national and transnational spectacles, culture becomes less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation, the latter often to multiple and spatially dislocated audiences. (Appadurai, 1997, 43-44)

Because of this constant stress of what Appadurai calls 'consciously choosing', perhaps I have forgotten that one actually doesn't choose an art practice, it in some way happens to the artist. That is the only way art can ever truly just be, and remain present, unconscious of itself.

 I have a project brewing in my mind and will keep posting pictures as and when it gets along.

studio jan 18

Incomplete Still Life, GSaxena, acrylic, Jan 18 2011

 I have to play catch up with everything that comprises my imagined practice. As you can see painting and drawing form a large part of that imagination. I am trying to pick up where I left off.

This still life composition became on its own. A flowering bulb of mine had dried up in its pot (placed inside a glass cup). I was just rearranging and cleaning when the colors in the composition seemed to become important for me. The internet never reproduces reds and pinks justifiably... but still one gets an idea.

kahlo and the self

Frida Kahlo - Self-portrait, The broken column, 1944

Frida Kahlo in her studio with The Two Fridas, Coyoacán, Mexico

It is a tumultuous affair to merely look at her paintings, or read about Frida Kahlo (1907-1954), let alone--I imagine--to have been Frida Kahlo. She underwent 30 surgeries in her life (related to impediments she had since birth and a major accident when she was 18), had 3 abortions and no children, her one leg was eventually amputated, and she had a torrential emotional life. Painting came to her at a time she was physically impaired unable to move. Because of her work, life, and the inspiration she was visited with,  a great romantic imagination surrounds Ms. Kahlo today. Her paintings are straight forward, personal, representational, sometimes full of pain.  She embodies the popular concept of an Artist with a capital A.

What is the place that representation holds in painting and drawing today? And what is it relation to me? Pain and love and the story of the self were important for Ms. Kahlo's work. But such intensities are not present in all art one sees. Are they?

Language can evaporate the ephemeral. And today my ideas are ephemeral or perhaps non-present. Best to start a new drawing...

In the painting below titled, "What the Water Gave Me" Kahlo has painted a vision perhaps she had while bathing. In the middle of the painting one can see a naked Kahlo being strangled indirectly as the rope goes through various nodes before reaching its end, or wrapping itself around Kahlo's neck. Insects and figures do a tight rope walk on this very strangling device. Her dress floats away close by, a bird lies dead on a tree top, a building is consumed by a fire volcano, a couple hides behind a bush, a ship is close by this imagination, one woman comforts another. It is a fragile system, a vulnerable system... Maybe it is a spider that has trapped Kahlo.

What the Water Gave Me, Frida Kahlo, 1938

Self-Portrait with Monkey, Kahlo Frida,  1938

studio jan 17

4 Studies (Not in the order they were made) , Jan 2011, GSaxena, acrylic, 7"x5"

Agnes Martin, in the previously posted interview, said something about how inspiration will pass through the artist, if the artist is still enough. And if the artist is still enough they can catch the inspiration, and should then let it be just as it is, without their ego affecting it. She also rallied a bit against the education system that asked its students to overproduce, to mold themselves, to experiment etc etc.

To be honest, if I were to follow Martin's principles, it would be hard for me to know what to do, how long to wait, and then perhaps stillness would be of great value. Currently I am thinking of everything from installations, to drawings, to fabric, to paintings, to illustrations (is that experimentation? it is not without inspiration...) I am thinking of the prolific. I just have to do it that way at the moment, get it all out of my system. Sort of like when I clean a very cluttered room.

Speaking of clutter, my instinct is to either clean if I have the energy. I throw things if I am racing against time and space, if i have to move away, or if i am upset. If I feel ill, I just let things be, and spaces become overwhelming. If I am to have people over, according to me instincts I am inclined to clean. It was the same when I used to have studio visits in graduate school. If I knew someone would be about to visit me, I would clean and sweep up. I became nervous about cleaning eventually, especially when I was made aware of over designed qualities in my work. I wondered if cleaning was a facade--sort of like sweeping something embarrassing away. Maybe I was sweeping away some important incompleteness each time. In the case of such self doubt, something inside collapsed. I started to resist the urge to clean, but along with that certain other things became resisted/repressed as well due to self consciousness. I didn't produce much work, I believe, after that.

However, I feel ready to face that something or incompleteness now. I stand behind a closed door, eager. As far as what form my practice should take... I will try to do it all, and as when it comes to me. Even if it means drawing something representational, weaving a form, taking a picture etc etc. I have to know what is there, and it won't do to edit.

Multiplicity, polyphony are there.

studio jan 13

New Work, Jan 14 2011, Gsaxena

agnes martin and ideas

Agnes Martin, Stars, 1963, 12x12 inches, ink and watercolor.

Agnes Martin (1912-2004) was a very interesting artist, in that she spent her life mostly by herself. Her art, in itself, is interesting because it is known to primarily comprise of painted, printed, and drawn grids--very beautiful ones. In a longer version of the video above, Martin says something about experimentation that is frustrating and revealing. I paraphrasing her: "Art was never made by experimentation, as if it were a science." She firmly believes that art comes from inspiration, that art can not be spoken about, only felt, and that ideas could only hinder the process of making.

I think something of her beliefs are actually lost in language once she phrased them. For instance, as most of her body of work comprises grids, one can say her whole career in a way dealt with an experimentation with the grid form. Martin would fervently deny such a statement... and she would be right. The unavoidable problem is in using language/words to frame the art process. I think Martin was able to achieve an empty mind-- and in that emptiness those grids glided gracefully, finding a space to occupy with dignity and beauty. It wouldn't have been possible if she thought, "Now I must create as many forms of the grid as possible."

Also, Martin's work does comprise other images than grids...

Agnes Martin, "Untitled" (2004). 
Ink on paper. 3 1/2" × 2 3/4".

a gambit of equal value

There are a lot of things on my mind. Since the morning I worked on a collage, cleaned up pictures, looked at other artist images, spoke to my family oversees, and... decided to withdraw from my M.Phil program (cinema studies)... I just wrote to my guide and explained the circumstances.

Nowadays, my mind is bursting with a creative fervor; more often than not I find myself drifting into my art studio/practice everyday--looking at artist work, making work of my own, guilty escapes--rather than focusing on my thesis. It is a well thought and fair decision to leave the program, and my heart and vision feels lighter. Now I await what my guide says...

I learned quite a bit from the M.Phil program. Through it I was able to connect to a world of philosophy and cultural studies--to the Frankfurt school, the Marxist, the structuralist, post-structuralist, phenomenologists, ethnographers, film theorists, postmodernists, etc--that I found intimidating to study on my own. Those fields are so vast however that I have merely scratched their surface, but at least I have an entry-point now.

Here is an image/object fresh from the studio:

pfaff and scale

Judy Pfaff, "Umidum", 2011, honeycomb cardboard, wire frame, expanded
foam, shellac, sunflowers, tree fungus, paper lanterns, approx. 128 x 162
x 36 in. Courtesy of the artist and Ameringer, McEnery, and Yohe, New
York.


Judy Pfaff, Flusso E Riflusso 1992 Steel, wire,
wood and paint 12 feet x 25 feet x 20 feet
Max Protetch Gallery, New York, NY


Judy Pfaff will have a show at the Weatherspoon Museum soon. Since I am thinking of starting a large scale drawing, her work seems very relevant to look at. Materials ooze out of Ms. Pfaff--varying in color and density. I am not sure whether her drawings are like landscapes, or have a dynamic movement in them--perhaps they are shifting. An interesting one to look at is her 2009 drawing Rosie's Bed. Her sculptures and installations are tense with momentum. Aware of space, they seem to crystallize the concept of aggressive and graceful growth in nature (and otherwise?). Each surface of her drawing, individually deserves to be called prolific.

Her studio looks amazing as well... so large. I can only imagine all the material skills she has acquired through her approximately 30 years of artistic career. I am slightly envious! Some very interesting videos of Pfaff at work can be seen on the Art 21 website.


Judy Pfaff, . . . all of the above
2007 Ameringer/Yohe Fine Art, New York, NY.