Nasreen: Mutating Chaos
The perceptual and the visionary were the differing modes considered by the artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937-1990) in the stellar dimensions of her work.
In an entry in her diary she observed that there were several visions:
the comparison between the habitual eye and the scientific eye and the intuitive eye.1
This could well be a means of comprehending her art which mutated over three decades from swathes of unruly colour to those pristine lines which denoted disciplined movement. It called for a constant navigation between the sensuous and the ordered in a propelling, relentless manner.
The somewhat anarchic swishes of colour which were the earliest record of her artistic career in the sixties were indeed contrary to the work she did later. But as we shall see they were the interface, the compulsive force behind her matchstick strokes that webbed the surface and enlarged its frame in the mature period. If these spidery marks celebrated the planar, they were at the same time drawing attention to a world beyond that of the immediate, where rhythmic gestures tapped internal energies.
With the highly restrained pattern of lines made in watercolour, ink or pencil on paper with precision instruments in the seventies, she had already crossed the arc of modernism and was beginning to dwell on the non-event on the canvas. These strokes in their rigour were linked with minimalism which denoted a level of freedom from the individualistic and the gestural and were to spell out an autonomous, spectral existence. They were neutral in that they had no link with atmosphere or the vagaries of expression and mood. They exercised a fascination with an infinity beyond the vanishing point, indeed beyond any comprehensible view. It was perhaps at this stage that Nasreen’s work could have been considered in some sense spiritual but in a special way where the vast plenitude was not mythologized or iconicized. It was seen as a necessary adjunct to material life and a continuation of her own preoccupation with the particular. And for all her hermetic existence and her avoidance of the sensuous day-to-day activities indulged in by people of her generation, she was avidly interested in all that modernity could yield with its energy and diversity. It was perhaps in the fitness of things that she delved into Zen for more than anything else this school of Asian philosophy provoked a lyric relationship with the world-- something which both attracted and repelled her.
The city, the highways, the vast stretches of sand were captured in the photographs which Nasreen took over a life- time and never exhibited. But these immense spaces which she framed, the deserts, sea shores and roads, and the microcosm, the interstices of man-built creations, were a transcendence of the actual in order to reveal the sheer immensity of the real, the mundane. The special quality of these photographs is the magnitude, even absurd scale of the normal and the ordinary. The car tyres or the cow’s tail could be singled out and enlarged so that the grittiness of existence could be memorialised. To exhibit these would have been to reveal her essential secret which was a strong connection with materiality.
It can be no accident that many of her colleagues were those who later represented high modernism in India. She encountered some of them while working in her studio at the Bhulabhai Desai Institute, a place for multi disciplinary activity in Bombay in the sixties. Thus her interactions with V.S. Gaitonde and Tyeb Mehta made a profound impact on her. She had a teasing, friendly but also work oriented relationship with Krishen Khanna and Bal Chhabda. She accompanied M.F. Husain as the still photographer when he went to shoot his film in Rajasthan ‘Through the eyes of a Painter’. From Gaitonde she was impacted with a life-making decision: to harvest the oceanic and retrieve its infinitesimal quality. As she noted in her diary on 3rd November 1959:
..Today Gai (Gaitonde) was reading Will Durant. He talks of the relationship of man and woman and the universe. Something else which I have suddenly realized—calm after storm—of course this is just a statement but what I want to say is, that one should be aware of the storm while it is there…Nothingness and again nothingness….Those patterns on the beach. Those little crabs which make those endless patterns. Something like those beautiful draperies and tapestries. To make an effort to do anything seems so futile. Everything in nature is so perfect. To copy is of course out of the question, but even to create—is it creation. I feel empty and useless. That light on the beach. Those zig zag designs that waves leave on the sands.2
And she learnt the language of a dismembered reality from Tyeb later in Delhi. There is an element of being overwhelmed by history around the seventies:
Plainer surfaces with concentrated depths.
Each line, texture (form) are born of effort, history and pain.3
Then in her diary on 22nd July 1971:
Looking at Tyeb’s preliminary drawing on the canvas-an approach through mathematics to arrive at the same through different means, e.g. each dot, line creating proportions in a total form.
A silent awesome pregnancy before rain.4
In the same vein she wrote a few months later:
Complete concentration and awareness on waiting and patience—resulting in thoughts and action.
Talking to Tyeb—troubled—and out of this chaos a further direction. An instant caught in the diversity of time and space…5
Her earlier affinity with Paul Klee and Kandinsky led her to think of movements in space which veered towards the spiritual. In a reflective mode she wrote on 30th September 1970:
Again I am reassured by Kandinsky—the need to take from an outer environment and bring it an inner necessity. I stress on the inner—almost a year ago when I read similar thoughts expressed by Klee. The world is raging a war from the outside and mine is an inner one. Both are valid and necessary.
Despair after a long period but a kind of despair which is slowly reflected and understood. Not the former kind of total despair.6
Much later Jeram Patel with his blow torch on wood methods which invoked negative spaces and a boundless disorder provided the axis from which Nasreen would affix her own purities. Adjacent to her stood Gulam and Nilima Sheikh, Jyoti and Jyotsna Bhatt, her friends and contemporaries in Baroda, balancing the plank of post modernism.
She was perhaps one of the few women in the exclusive male domain of high modernism in India and she was accepted, appreciated even indulged.
But if Nasreen was nurtured in this lyric mode in its slow birth in this country by the seventies she had moved towards minimalism, the extreme end of modernism as a means of building her own vocabulary in art. She began to make sharp strong and yet delicate marks on the surface loosely prefixed on a grid which marked time as it were. She wrote:
In the midst of these arid silences one picks up a few threads of texture and form. It is not that one is not with the rhythm of the fair but one digs deeper to find the origin of these rhythms. Only then does one find one’s identity—not only an identity but a deeper rhythm which engulfs every tiny atom.
One can be absolutely silent and share the dancing rhythms. The same rhythms see through despair. Only one has to recognise it…7
Minimalism as we know emphasized the empirical, concrete world and nothing was more suspect for it than the manipulation of colour and strokes on the surface for effect, authorship and self-expression. But in her excavation of biomorphic realities Nasreen could be likened most to the artist Agnes Martin whose austere works emphasized touch with all the gridded lines drawn carefully by hand invoking texture that she sometimes weaved. In their sense of solitude Martin’s works like ‘Night Sea’ (1963) or ‘Milk River’ (1963) invoked metaphysical messages. As the art historian Geeta Kapur points out,” The floor in the house of Agnes Martin, as in Nasreen’s house, was polished stone: no prints of the bare foot, no illusion, only the surface. It is worth pursuing the comparison with Martin: she worked with simple found objects; she painted dots of atmospheric colour; she drew people, grass, as little rectangles; she worked out spaces between drops of rain. She made an airy matrix…Thus Nasreen is quite like Agnes Martin and not so too. ..But while Agnes Martin says that ‘in the diagonal the ends hang loose’, or that ‘the circle expands too much’8, Nasreen goes on to use both the diagonal and the circle.”9 It can be said that Nasreen intuitively contended with structures of classical Indian music and oriental aesthetics thereby stipulating an Asian modernism. She made the surface her domain and began to mark what was a non-presence on its planar journey across the board. These began to form loosely knit textural patterns which contained animated movement despite their restraint. In India she stood alone, coming as if from nowhere, inadvertently questioning modernism’s claims to patriarchal exclusivity. The privileged space now had to be shared with a woman and one who for all her fragile elegance stood firm.
The swishing to and fro of the broom on the floor is rather like moving the brush on the canvas. It is not surprising that Carl Andre known for his floor installations linked up with Nasreen when he came to Delhi for the Second Triennale in 1971. Andre had from the sixties moved wholesale to the floor stacking it with bricks or spreading metal plates in a line or a grid. To heighten its lack of preciousness he allowed the viewers to walk on his work which lay like a rug along the plane of the floor. Although Eva Hesse with her soft, almost disintegrating sculptures was often seen in opposition to Andre’s and Sol Le Witt’s (with whom she was friends) hard- edged ones, the underlying like- mindedness comes from a desire to overturn their own rationalism. As Briony Fer points out, “Far from Hesse representing the ‘irrational’ to Andre’s ‘rational’, I want to suggest that their work alike embodies both the formal ordering of modernism and its own arbitrary and obsessive underside….The possibility for material to disintegrate, so evident in Hesse’s work, acts reciprocally with (and on) the actual and imagined resilience of Andre’s –actual because it can literally be walked on, bearing any amount of wear and tear, and imagined in the appearance of the surface as obdurate. As minimal art has aged, such pristine durable surfaces seem somehow less important for their newness or their industrial origins than for the irrational ground that they inhabit.”10 To revert to Nasreen it is precisely this fall from grace which would interest her, this rhizoid existence. She clambered down from the airy denizens of mathematics and infinity to diagonals and finally to curves. In her move away from the grid she began to create forms which floated to the edge of minimalism. Her peripatetic gaze had shifted away to disorder and a quest for disintegration.
Again and again in her diaries we encounter chaos, the deep gutted chaos, till she learns to confront and befriend it. It is this despair which is the palpitating presence of living and she does not shy away from it. It follows her everywhere from the deserts of Bahrain and Kuwait to the seashores of Kihim and gifts her with a heightened awareness of growth and change. As her end approaches in the late eighties she still holds her instruments and orders her life despite a debilitating neurological disorder which makes motor functioning difficult. The lines which form curves, which link one end to another, which delicately enclose space also curve upwards. It is appropriate that she would end with only new beginnings for she constantly hankered after them:
Wind break
Large shadows below
Multiple
Speed
Vibrations.Multiple
Intensity of sweep
Undulating
Concentration on tangent
Curve
Curve slowly coming to 0.
Silence oasis in acoustic parks.
Different situations.
New roads.
Traffic islands.
Space in front of or adjoining building
Balconies
Terraces. 11
She passed away quietly close to the sea with her relatives near by at her home in Kihim. But the curve like the crescent heralds the approach of the full moon. Her elegant works provided a means of articulating order and its converse, disorder. Even as a whole generation of women artists reared their heads in the eighties and nineties we see the surfacing of Nasreen’s resplendent textures in the works of the young who carry her legacy forward.
NOTES
- Nasreen’s Diaries introduced by Yashodhara Dalmia in ‘Nasreen in Retrospect’ edited by Altaf, Ashraf Mohamedi Trust, Bombay 1995, entry dated 3rd October, 1972.
- Diaries, Ibid, entry dated 3rd November 1959.
- Diaries, Op cit, entry dated 20th July 1971.
- Diaries, Op cit, entry dated 22nd July 1971.
- Diaries, Op cit, entry dated 25th November 1971.
- Diaries, Op cit, entry dated 30th September 1970.
- Diaries, Op cit, 12th March 1971, Baroda
- Agnes Martin ‘The Untroubled Mind’ in “Agnes Martin” edited by Barbara Haskell, Whitney Museum of American Art, Harry N.Abrams, New York, 1992.
- Geeta Kapur ‘Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved’ in “When Was Modernism” Tulika Press, New Delhi, 2000.
- Briony Fer ‘Bordering on the Blank: Eva Hesse and Minimalism’ in “Eva Hesse” October Files, Massachusetts, 2002.
- Diaries, Op.cit, 1988.