The Split Universe / Review of Baiju Parthan's work

Published in Art India, Dec. 2016

The Split Universe

Anuj Daga floats through Baiju Parthan’s world where the natural, the geometrical and the digital are juxtaposed together.


It is difficult to decipher if Necessary Illusions by Baiju Parthan from the 14th of September to the 5th of November at Art Musings, Mumbai, emphasizes or dissolves the split between art and science – a notion that has been carried from the period of the Enlightenment. Historians of science have debated about the way in which artistic versus scientific approaches (which actually carried different semantic charges then) have come to influence the cultural understanding of objects around us. Eric Schatzberg, a scholar at the Department of the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin, argues (1) that broader meanings of art and its centrality to generating knowledge about objects by operating upon them were displaced into the ‘technological’ narrative of science (2) with the onset of industrialisation. Eventually, such a categorization created a divide between the mind and the hand, thinking and making. Parthan’s acrylics on canvas and lenticular prints compel us to ponder upon this illusory divide between the arts and the sciences by merging different realities.

Today, these multiple realities about a singular object are easily recorded, preserved and accumulated as ‘Big Data’ that contain complex information about objects beyond what the human mind or even computers can process at once. By merely juxtaposing several structures of knowledge – chemical, structural, geospatial, geometrical, astronomical and digital – Parthan evokes the different frequencies and densities in which the world may have been crystallized into varied physical forms. For example, in the painting Meta-Flora, a flower is presented in its range of readings – the softness of petals, their ocular perception, the wireframe construct of their curve, the molecular structure that lends them colour and smell, their symbolic appropriations, all become visible on a single canvas. In a similar manner, in yet another painting Engineered Fruit (Disrupterr), the motif of a pear is blown up but caged within its geometrical formation, scaled against the cartography of the sky, immediately drawing astronomical connections between the two: the shape of the space we inhabit and the shape of the things we consume. These hand-painted imageries immediately bring us closer to the varied experiments of the naturalists, botanists, astronomers, cartographers and enthusiasts dedicated to deciphering the natural world. The pursuit of the design of nature, which was ‘purist’ in the works of earlier artists, has become multilayered in the work of the artist today.

Parthan further makes the art-science discourse more contemporary through his lenticular experiments in the second section of the show. Here, we encounter semi-animated images of the pear dissolving into words that become elastic, stretching their own meanings. As one shifts the position of viewing, the raw fruit ripens and diffracts into its own existential politics. The words seen through the moving gaze refer to the embeddedness of the consumable object within larger networks of trade, economics, production and biomorphics, eventually making us wonder if it even belongs to the natural world. Hung from the walls as free-falling objects, the pear parts that appear and disappear to the moving body, play between the actual and the imaginary – making the ghost of the real a necessary illusion. In another instance, one is pushed to believe that the data-drowned objects of today are caught up in their own evolutionary time – an anomalous raw-ripe maturity. Classification tables now morph objects and their multiple identities, bringing us to a space of ambiguity where ‘things’ have as much agency as humans may have once had. The lenticular layers of these panels present the dangers and depths of data pools within which our lives are suspended.

In his last set, Parthan reimagines living in a phenomenally restructured world, where all objects are packets of information. Parthan’s constructions emphasize our uncanny navigation through the everyday as insecure datascapes. Hovering objects like aeroplanes, gas balloons or even sharks over ordinary urban settings evoke an atmosphere of suspicion due to over-indulgence in information practices. However, in some instances, these motifs seem too literal vis-a-vis their historical referents. The equation of floating sharks to terrorists over the Gateway of India seems too direct a reference to the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. On the other hand, taxis levitating through balloons at the Victoria Train Terminus confuse: does the work depict a flight into history or the future? While it recalls Rene Magritte’s Golconda that depicts scenes of ‘raining men’, the work does not have a strong surreal impact. Nevertheless, the technique engages the viewer in a play of perception – where each eye possibly beholds a relevant scientific reality. Parthan’s artistic renderings thus enable every viewer to participate in his own process of decoding the world and uncovering a certain truth.


End-notes

1) See Schatzberg Eric’s “From Art to Applied Science” in Isis, Vol. 103, No. 3, September 2012, pgs. 555-563.

2) Earlier, it was held that art is directed toward action, science toward contemplation.




1) Baiju Parthan. Meta-Flora. Acrylic on canvas. 48” x 96”. 2016. Image courtesy the artist and Art Musings.

Other Images

Laurie Baker Works

I haven't invested enough in studying Laurie Baker, until now. Perhaps his work suffers over-identification by the badge of architects who practice "sustainable architecture" today. To ask whether Baker really was practicing sustainability may be a tricky question. After all, much of his work uses local material, climatic responses and immense contextuality to their sites. Yet, his work doesn't end up like the vernacular - one sees bold experiments in form, as well as material technique. Swirling curves in brick, flowing slabs of concrete, porous walls with intricate lattice jalis - don't these convey a compulsive spirit of the modern? Often these gestures get misread as vernacular. Enthusiasts of sustainable practice consistently fail to acknowledge the formal experiments of Baker, over emphasizing upon the cost effectiveness of building technique.

Baker wrote numerous books on cost-effective construction techniques. Available to the common man easily, he often reduced for people building techniques almost like applicable formulae. This has become the primary mode in which we consume, understand and remember Baker today. While written as mere essentials of construction process, he never fell in the formulaic trap, constantly innovating and critically evolving his material conception of space. This fundamental split in the way we consume versus experience Baker's architecture has made us categorically leave out Baker in the mainstream modern architectural discourse. Further, in framing his buildings merely as "cost-effective" or "sustainable", we have foreshadowed the experiential aspects of his buildings to a large extent, reducing our focus merely to his use of material and techniques.

We are introduced to an extensive range of methods in which a set of bricks can be put together in moving through Baker's buildings. The manner in which surfacial textures are created merely by a variation in the way brick is twisted/moved and re-placed over one another opens up worlds of experiences (ref: The Smooth and the Striated, Gilles Deleuze). In structure and skin, the brick forever reveals itself in new ways. Occasionally contrasted with concrete, his buildings cover the entire spectrum from smooth to coarse - invoking a phenomenal experience. One wonders how constraints of costs and resource, within a given social context, can bring about such an interesting phenomenological restructuring of architecture through a material that is otherwise constructs the mundane.

It is almost reductive of Baker, at various instances, to justify these diverse culturally multidimensional solutions as merely functions of economy or affordability. To make one's dynamic architecture be understood as so utilitarian seems to me an over-rational narrative that he may have prepared as a dose for political consumption of bureaucrats and people with low design consciousness. Was Baker doing so to "sell" his ideas? Rather, it was his challenge to make his design narrative so convenient to as to be accessible to common man. Perhaps he anticipated a possibility where the common man could participate in appreciating design if its language became more accessible.

Was poetry not appreciated enough in Baker's work environment for him to express in a narrative exciting beyond the utilitarian? His works exemplify poetics of space in the minute details and sensitivity to site. Without a doubt, Baker's sites did much for him - he was intelligent enough to locate his projects (in many instances) letting the landscape in the building tactfully.  Baker's forms and spatialities do not speak of poverty. They are full of life and longing in their attention to human scale, gesture, all rolled into a minimal aesthetic. To a large extent, Baker begins to answer what Kahn asks profoundly "What does the brick want to be?" What architectural questions did Baker want to pose through his forms? What experiential structure did he create through his architectural endavour? What phenomenological openings do Baker's project invoke? These are questions that remain uninitiated in the scholarship on Laurie Baker by far.

Life-Review

Over the last few months, I have been extremely busy with SEA, a curatorial project I was working on with Riyas Komu, the Kochi Biennale and some writing. In between all of that, several other things were going on. One, for example was our study trip to Kerala, which I would have loved to write about. We visited the buildings of Laurie Baker, and later spent four days documenting Kochi. Additionally, after coming back, we had to get on to assisting the students with preparing drawings and artworks for the Kochi. And immediately following that was the Architectural Design studio for the same class (second year). Running around all of this, my body gave up to dengue, which kept me bedridden for about 2 weeks, and weak for around four.

Once I regained my strength, I had to get back to a lot of pending work. All the above things, but more importantly, by this time, the curatorial project 'Young Subcontinent' had begun to take momentum, and it demanded attention as much as the Kochi student biennale submission. It was a challenging time - for a lot had to be accomplished simultaneously. Having gone through it, I feel relieved.

In the next few posts, I will try to elaborate upon several distinct episodes listed below:
1. The Kerala Trip
2. The Kochi Student Biennale
3. The Young Subcontinent Project

I am not sure if I will be able to write enough - for now much has become distant, and will take up a reflective tone, losing the immediacy of thought. Primarily, writing has now taken a different seat in the scheme of things I am doing, making this blog suffer. I have produced writings for several platforms other than the blog, that may not find their way here due to confidentiality and other such issues. However, as time comes, people will be able to read me over more places. For example, I have written a shortened piece for the IES magazine Le E'spirit, along with a review of Baiju Parthan's show at Art Musings - for Art India. At the same time, I was writing several concept notes for projects for the Young Subcontinent Projects. Another abstract for a conference on Film and Architecture that I wrote was selected for a university in Australia - something I couldnot attend due to funding issues.

The SEA newsletter 3 was released, which demanded some copyediting. Many other ideas were noted, now lying in various diaries. I designed a full fleged catalogue for the Kochi Student Biennale titled "What is a Home?" Besides all of this, the amount of communication letters that I have written over the last few months is indefatigable. I hope all of this will culminate into something much more worthwhile, that which will also keep the blog going.