"Gaitonde between Goa and Guggenheim" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (22 November 2014)

The wait outside the iconic coil-shaped landmark seemed interminable as the autumnal weather grew colder, wetter, and windier. I reminded myself that I had been looking forward to this exhibition since it was first announced. When the doors were finally opened to the Saturday “Pay What You Wish” crowd, I dodged through the throng. I steeled myself as I entered the gallery on the fourth floor. Perhaps it was because of the miserable weather outside that I expected to see a bleakness of expression in the man’s art. Indeed, I had let myself be prejudiced by the knowledge that the artist had been distant from his family and a recluse. Instead, face to face with his work for the first time, I realised that nothing had prepared me for the profound simplicity of the art of Goan painter Vasudeo Santu Gaitonde (1924-2001).

Curated by Sandhini Poddar, this first major retrospective of Gaitonde’s oeuvre brings him to world attention, just as one of his pieces sold for the highest amount ever paid for a work of art in India at a Christie’s auction last year. Titled “V. S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life,” the exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in October and will run till February 2015.

Having spent the earlier part of the evening taking in The Metropolitan Museum’s Cubism exhibition and seeing still more abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art, it was easy to see how Gaitonde’s paintings might sit side by side with that of his Western contemporaries, such as Klee and Rothko. In the book of the same name as the exhibition, Poddar quotes art critic Geeta Kapur’s observation “that modernism as it develops in postcolonial cultures has the oddest retroactive trajectories … [which in] crisscrossing the western mainstream and, in their very disalignment from it, … [restructure] the international.” This view is bolstered by critic Hal Foster, whom Poddar refers to as saying of abstraction that it has no “single origin … [A]bstraction was found as much as it was invented.” Surveying earlier Indian, Chinese, and Japanese art – the last mostly because of her subject’s own interest in Zen Buddhism – Poddar successfully demonstrates how Gaitonde, his Indian contemporaries, and Asian art in general, must be accounted for if modern art is to be understood as a comprehensively international phenomenon.

And, yet, despite the retrospective’s desire to posit Gaitonde as a notable exponent of modern abstraction of an international ilk, it can only do so by resolutely claiming the artist as an Indian figure. While little may be known of Gaitonde due to the limited recognition he received in his lifetime and having died in near-obscurity, the exhibition further obfuscates the painter’s origins. A timeline that intersperses events in Gaitonde’s life with South Asian and Indian national history can be seen by those that come to the exhibition. It notes his birthplace as Nagpur, Maharashtra, but it also states that he spent part of his childhood in Goa, where his parents were from. Curiously, even as the timeline records India’s independence from the British in 1947 and, then, the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, nothing is said of the transference of Goa between Portugal and India in 1961.

It is not that one should expect that an exhibition of this nature would necessarily underscore Gaitonde’s ethnic origins even as it mentions them in passing, but it is also noteworthy that it

constantly reiterates his Indianness for specific purposes. The first is to fix Gaitonde as a product of the artistic milieu of the formerly British India, especially because of his time from 1948 on at Bombay’s Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art, and so, consequently, to highlight how Gaitonde and his peers fit into a schema of art history that proves Indian modern art should be considered as being on par with its international counterparts. That other artist of the post-Independence Progressive movement, F. N. Souza, finds mention in Poddar’s book, but nothing is said of his Goanness or his friendship with Gaitonde. To be clear, it is not the lacunae around Goan identity that I am calling out here, but how the retrospective’s binary of India and the West can only be created by eschewing any consideration of the cosmopolitanness of being Goan. 

Certainly, Gaitonde may have spent most of his lifetime outside Goa and a brief stint in New York, but one wonders how Goa may have influenced his art. As I take in the vision of this master of balance as it communicates itself to me through his work, I notice how he plays with depth: it is like looking into a boundless ocean at times. “Gaitonde missed the sea…,” his friend and fellow artist Ram Kumar says in Poddar’s book. And though Goa is disappeared in this presentation of his art, one may speculate how inescapable the trace of it is when Poddar shares the words of Burmese Indian critic Richard Bartholomew, who writes: “The landscape of memory is the subject of painters like … V. S. Gaitonde.”  

From The Goan.

"The Last Days of Summer" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (25 October 2014)

I stand outside my motel room on the balcony overlooking the swimming pool. Below, a cacophony of screams erupts as little children splash about in the water, bringing smiles to the faces of their adult guardians. They recall what it was like to be this young and carefree. 

“It will take some time to get used to, this genteel south,” my new employer had said. I try to gauge his tone and the almost smile that flickers on his lips. In these early days of starting anew in a part of America largely unknown to me, I mostly stay in my rented room with the smell of stale cigarette smoke to keep me company. All my enquiries for longer term housing are made on the phone. “New to Virginia?” they ask. I respond vaguely.

Although I was five, I still remember that vacation, my first visit to the United States. My mum, sister, and I had accompanied my uncle and his family on the long ride to Virginia, the drive made in the small hours of the morning from across the Canadian border. It was so early that when we arrived at the border checkpoint, I groggily wondered how we had gotten there. I was concerned with how many cartoon shows I was going to miss more than where we were headed. 

A small caravan of Goan folks in two cars, our extended family ensconced itself at a motel not unlike the one I find myself in now. The summer sun shone down furiously on Virginia Beach and the sea beckoned. We’d alternate our time between the ocean and the swimming pool at the motel. Only allowed in under supervision, we kids enjoyed splashing around in the chlorinated water of the pool. A group of young Italian tourists asked my mother if I was her son and if they could speak to me. Amused, she later asked her brother, “Why do you think those hippies are so interested in him?” My uncle responded, “Yeah, I noticed that. They want to be dark like him.” Anytime the Italians saw me around, they would come by to chat and ask how I was doing. “Ciao!” they’d say when they left. 

 

On the beach, a Christian organization handed out comic books and colouring pencils to the children my age. They organized games for anyone interested, with prizes awarded for participation. These consisted of more proselytising material like the comic books. I was drawn in by the bright baubles and my mother let me join the play group for my age range. Explaining how the game was meant to be played, one of the adult volunteers asked us to form a circle. “Now, hold the hand of the person next to you,” he said from the centre of the formation. I reached out my hand to the blonde girl to the right of me. She looked at me and quickly clasped her left hand to her chest, letting herself be pulled away by the child on her right whose hand she had been holding. The circle remained broken.

I cannot remember now if I stayed to play the game. Instead, I recall being sullen the rest of the day, unable to articulate why I felt that way. When I looked at the comic book I received, Jesus stared back, his long blonde hair sweeping his shoulders and framing his paper-white face.

Finally, I find an apartment in town. It is near the train station. In front of it is a marker that mentions the history of the location. It was where the auction houses for black slaves were once situated. On the other side of the street stands the Slavery Reconciliation Statue in which two figures embrace. A chill runs across my dark skin. It is the end of summer. As the leaves fall and litter the street, I realise it is too late for the beach this year.

From The Goan.

"How do you Take It?" - MIZNA & RADIUS of ARAB AMERICAN WRITERS INC: #civilpoem (23 October 2014)

 

A cup of tea so civil until the taste of hemlock.

Shaped like sugar cubes, conformity kills

Sweetly. 


From Mizna.

"I Never Lived Here" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (23 August 2014)

All the contents of this house have been boxed up, sold, or given away. In a short while, the rental company will relieve me of the keys. I don’t live here anymore. But this was never mine to begin with. That is not to say that I did not inhabit this home, or that I do not wonder what lies in its future. I will have memories long after I leave this country, but they are momentary in the wider span of the histories that precede mine and legacies that will extend far after I have moved on from this place. Already, the agent has been showing the house to prospective tenants. The time will come when, like the rest of this gentrifying neighbourhood, this old house will give way to some postmodern condominium development: at once a conglomeration of the like-minded and -monied and, yet, each unknown to the next in their atomisation. As one form of lifestyle dwelling replaces the other, what else will be lost?

They call this region the Yarra. But even as it harks back to the past, it is not a name that can be relegated to the mists of time. When I first got to Australia, I was struck by the acknowledgment of Aboriginal history at most public events. As preamble to their own presentations, speakers pay deference to indigenous genealogy, noting the traditional ownership of the land and of Aboriginal elders past and present. In my experience, such awareness of Native peoples in the United States is something that is not generally part of public rhetoric, as is much the case in Goa. Nonetheless, I began to introspect on the effect of such vocalisations of Aboriginal awareness as in the Australian case and, moreover, how such performances participate in the continued effacement of the present realities of indigenous peoples.

When the tribal identities of Goa’s First Peoples are recognised, it is often in the service of usurping the cultural expressions of these marginalised groups for the purpose of promoting the notion of Goan authenticity or tourism culture – and, really, one would be hard pressed to differentiate between these practices of cultural consumption. For instance, note the ubiquity of the so-called ‘Kunbi dance’ performed both at public functions in Goa and the diaspora, but also on the Panjim cruise boats catering to tourists. It is such performances of multiculturalism that need to be questioned for their insidiousness. Accordingly, as much as one might think themselves conversant with indigenous traditions or in a position to be deferential to Aboriginal legacies, such efforts are always fraught with consigning indigeneity to the past while still consuming the traditions of those very peoples as if they no longer exist.

Consider Aboriginal feminist writer Celeste Liddle’s distrust of Australia’s Recognise programme, which she describes as “a government-sponsored ad campaign removed from grassroots Indigenous opinion.” In a blog entry this month, Liddle features a photograph of the symbol of the Recognise campaign as it appears on the side of a Qantas jet, right by the national carrier’s own kangaroo logo. She reveals the cynicism of the manipulative PR at play, saying:  “Yet another gigantic corporate entity decides to show mob just how much it wants us to be Recognised. Doesn't that just give you those warm and fuzzy feelings?” Indeed, what Liddle queries is how ineffectively rhetoric and performance translates to change on the ground.

This ground that I was privileged to occupy belongs to the Wurundjeri people of the Yarra region. I come away from it the richer by not possessing it, by knowing it was never mine. For there is a history far greater than this moment, and I am still learning how to belong to it.

To see the print version of this post as it appears online, visit here.

"Windows Between Worlds" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (19 July 2014)

Save for their shape, the little panels of mother-of-pearl looked like the ones in the windows in my grandmother’s house. As a child, I had always marveled at the beauty of the delicate translucence of those windows. My uncle responded to my question by saying that mother-of-pearl was used before glass became more readily available and because, for Goans, the sea gave them shells to make windows with. Because the milky pearl-like shingles let in light but not sight, he added, old Goan homes could also do without curtains. This was certainly true in the Mandarin’s House in Macau, which I visited last month. Its naked windows were a display of wooden geometric shapes that, in lieu of glass, held captive nacreous bits that I learned had come from Goa.

The Mandarin’s House, thought to have been built in the late 19^th century, was recently restored and its doors thrown open to the public in the last few years. Its 21^st century renovation was overseen by the Chinese government, perhaps in an attempt to highlight Macau’s pre-colonial cultural ties to the mainland. That notwithstanding, the Mandarin’s House clearly demonstrates architectural traits that are not solely East Asian. As with Goa, Macau was a Portuguese territory; it was handed over to China in 1999. In various parts of the city-state, Lusitan influence is still apparent postcolonially. This is evident in the names of streets such as Avenida da Amizade and Rua da Madeira, as also in the fact that Portuguese is still an officially used language. In the Mandarin’s House, European design elements come into relief alongside Chinese ones, but as the use of the Goan opaline shards in the windows attests, there are other cultural factors to consider.  

In Goa, it is not exactly rare to see both chinoiserie and pottery of Chinese origin dating back to the colonial period. While blue and white pots punctuate the furnishings of the Mandarin’s House, bathed in the refracted light that filters through the iridescent window panes, the counterpart would be the family heirlooms and objet d’art of East Asian origin that are sometimes to be found in Goan homes or other institutions. They may take the form of vases and crockery in the colour scheme of azulejos, itself an Iberian art form borne of Moorish and orientalist imitation. 

The itinerary of these various objects – opalescent glass, blue and white tile, and china – suggests the cultural circuits of colonial trade that gave shape to class-inflected taste. But what do we know of the labour that fashioned and transported these items or of the colonial consumption of such articles that exceeded the specificity of a given household or institutional milieu? How did the travels of these pieces impact multiculturality within and across Portuguese colonies, to say nothing of the metropole in relation to these outposts? 

In other words, if a shared coloniality made for the appearance of the prized crockery in my grandmother’s home in Goa, do the windows in my ancestral home open onto another former Portuguese colony, one that shares the same kind of portals even if they are shaped differently? Did it mean the same thing to have “Goan” windows in Macau as it did to have “china” in Goa? Even as the Mandarin’s House takes pride of place in recently Chinese Macau, its legacy would seem to be a window into many other worlds, but not just those of times gone by.

To see the print version of this piece as it appears online, visit here.