One of the most intriguing aspects of Pullarwar’s projects is that he never intends them to be permanent always dismantling them after a relatively short period of time. The time specific installation Kite at the J. J. School of Art campus, Pulse at Phillips Contemporary which later won the most promising artist award at the National Gallery of Modern Art, Racing Pulse at the Jindal’s Art India Gallery and many other memorable works have dramatically altered our understanding of art. What remain are powerful memories along with the documentation supported by exquisite silk-screen mono-prints.

The present exhibition provides an opportunity to observe these mono-prints with a unique insight into the development of the above outdoor projects and installations. These, in turn, allow the viewer to examine the evolution of Pullarwar’s career from its origin. Each work in this exhibition is in some sense a self-portrait. Pullarwar rejects the ordinary distinction between truth and error of illusion. Since knowledge is initially anchored in sensation, impressions are produced in the mind by external stimuli and it is these impressions that the mind works over into forms inherent in the nature of mind itself. It is in this form which Pullarwar upholds his theory that something real is always present to perception, though the something may be misidentified. The misidentification may result not only from the partial identity mentioned above, but from limitations of our sense organs.

The artist feels it is a mistake to distinguish the work as true or false (truth functioning at the moment that we perceive the representational element in the work and false when we only see a collection of dots). The representative element in the work, perceived in greater or lesser proportion, marks the distinction between truth and error, with some degree of parity between any given perception and its object. Where ‘error’ occurs, it is owing to omission, that is, incomplete knowledge of the object present. Since such incomplete knowledge may occur in as many ways as there are individual viewers, the distinction between truth and error is an individual and private matter. If we uphold the term true of such experiences, it is not because real objects are not present in them, but their status is private rather than public. The works exhibit two orders of movement – one is sensual, the other is rational. In the former, many things come together with no inner connection between them. This association, which brings together the most diverse things, implies no internal but merely mechanical connection. It is only in the second, rational, order the accidental gives way to a conjunction where things do not merely come together but belong together. The sensation itself is purely a mental product, an elementary reaction of our sensibility against external action. If sense experience provides us with knowledge of objects, it is because the latter have been worked over by thought. Pullarwar insists that in all these cases the perception is real, but the presented object does not originate, nor can it do work of the real. Each impression, as it occurs, vanishes with its date, and since the time through which it perdures can be divided indefinitely into moments, the impression likewise is indefinitely divisible and so indefinitely many.

In art, the words originality and uniqueness are often over used; but in the case of Pullarwar these apprehensions of truth, at the level of sensation, involve the play of thought. It is difficult to describe them in words as his objects are never merely given, they are constructed.

 

Abhijeet Gondkar

Mumbai, October 2007