The Biological Factory
Death is non-movement
Stillness is life
Stillness is death
Stillness is the root of all life
Death is the root of all life.
Still Life today
In these object’s, Nilesh anticipates the concept of Still Life as an extension of the central nervous system, and shows “the body . . . as the site of connection to larger environments”. Much of the confusion in the art world today arises from the failure of the cultural establishment to recognize, once and for all, that elitism and permanence are dead. The future of art seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterworks but with defining alternative cultural strategies, through a series of communicative gestures in multi-media forms. As art and non-art become interchangeable, and the masterwork may only be a reel of punched or magnetized tape, the artist defines art less through any intrinsic value of the art object than by furnishing new conceptualities of life style and orientation.
Nilesh points out that traditional canons of literary and artistic judgement tend to place high value on permanence, uniqueness and the enduring universal value of chosen artifacts. Such aesthetic standards, he argues, were appropriate enough in a world of handcrafted goods and relatively small taste-making elites. These same standards, however, in no way, enable one to relate adequately to our present situation in which astronomical numbers of artifacts are mass produced, circulated and consumed. These may be identical, or only marginally different. Today’s artists, neither work for a tiny elite nor take seriously the idea of permanence is a virtue. The future of art, according to Nilesh seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterworks. Rather, artists work for the short term. Nilesh concludes that accelerated changes in the human condition require an array of symbolic images of man which will match up to the requirements of constant change. Fleeting impression and a high rate of obsolescence. We need, he says, ‘a replaceable expendable series of icons’.
One may quarrel with Nilesh’s contention that transience in art is desirable. Perhaps the flight from permanence is a tactical error. It can be argued that our artists are employing homeopathic magic, behaving like primitives who, awed by a force they do not comprehend, attempt to exert control over it by simple-mindedly imitating it. But whatever one’s attitude towards contemporary art, transience remains an implacable fact, a social and historic tendency so central to our times that it cannot be ignored.
The impulse towards transience in art explains the whole development of that most transient of art works, ‘the happening’. Allan Kaprow, who is often credited with originating the happening, has explicitly suggested its relationship to the throw away culture within which we live. The happening, according to its proponents, is ideally performed once and once only. All this cannot and does not leave us unchanged. It accelerates the rate at which the individual must process his imagery if he is to adapt successfully to the changing environment. Nobody really knows how we convert signals from outside into the images within. Yet psychology and the information sciences cast some light on what happens once the image is born.
Abhijeet Gondkar
November, 2018
Mumbai
Flux-( Who Am I ? )
Recognise me?….
Don’t you know me ?
But I have even more important question for you, tell me where am I ? What is this darkness all around me? What is touching my physique from all the sides? Do I have a visible form or I am only a substance forming a body? Do I exist? Am I having a dream in my sleep or this is how the darkness is surrounding me?
A gentle tap…… and I wobble and manage to turn and see the light!! Oh yes! Now I can see you as well….. Lying here for a long period of time… I had no visitor…. I was disengaged from any human contact… blown or flown away, dismembered, crushed, smashed just maintaining the skeletal identity… left just to meditate on my past & present…..
Frames with the slices of the ground from a particular unknown sight, with its soil contents and the first indicators of what might be the object…that is what Nilesh makes us confront. Each frame routinely framing only one thing for us & keeping the suspense about the location of the other things…somewhere possibly in the same frame. The first indicators trigger the imaginative search about the identity of the object, while simultaneously mind space is reforming it to its original condition.Identity which will help to memorise the name of it.
Nilesh slowly nudges the curious viewer to witness a site… revealing the layers and condition in which objects bearing the brutal impacts of the incidents,( which happened to them sometime in the near or distant past) are just presented in front of us as remains.The impact seen on the physique of the objects suggests that, what objects went through was extremely violent in nature. Observing the remains of the object & their scrutiny reveals, the direction from which the force worked upon the object… squashing its body and squeezing the life out of it. The soil or the substance which is flooding the surroundings of the objects and submerging them reveal some of the marks and giving some indicators. But they lead to a blank wall. As they do not necessary be the marks at the time the force worked upon the objects.The objects are literally being preserved after the brutal force battered it… destroying the fabric of its physique but not separating its skeletal remains… giving them the status of the fossils.
Like a crime scene we start witnessing a space in which the time has been frozen by the remains of the violence and its brutal impact. The brutality leads to an unanswered questions of ‘why’? ‘Who’?
Why such force worked upon these objects, who used it? Was it a human act or the forces of nature? The source of the force is hidden in time.
The frozen time also allows us to revisit the disengagement between the object and the one who possessed it.
Humans, shape the matter and make things…. Things are useful and we start keeping them with us.Their use gives them an identity. We start using them repeatedly.
Their functions are many, from cutting,heating,storing things to making sounds, to replicating the real life function in small scale and becoming a ‘toy’, or sometime writing with types and measuring time. Some of the objects require human involvement for their function, some only require a periodical touch. As the making of them has designed a function to behave like nature to work without human involvement . Slowly they start participating in our thought process and get fused with emotions. We start enjoying them and cherish the memory of the experiences. We fantasise them, theorised them and create a way to treating and coexisting with them, creating a flavour for life.
This deep engagement with objects is being presented by Nilesh is his work. He chooses to present the objects which are being separated from humans… due to various reasons. Sometimes the owner grows up and disengages with the object, some times new avatar of the object makes the former, ‘outdated’ & some times they are just left behind in settlements, sometime they are broken,due to some accidents or human folly.
The works created by Nilesh provides the stage for the disengagement. It reveals the act of time providing the various identities of the object. The saga provides the object in moment, where it has just lost the cultured identity and about to get dismembered,disfigured. The same process may further transform the objects in their minimal form of the pure substance. In a way we get a glimpse of a life cycle of an object & the culture which grows around it. We start observing the layers of the identity and pierce them with our imagination. The piercing vision takes beyond the identities , in the realm of pure form. We become the witness and go beyond the identities of the physical reality. The words from the Upanishad reverberate in the mind.
Poornamada poornamidam
Poornat poornamudachyate
Poornasya Poornamaadaya
Poornameva avashishyate
( Add completeness to completeness and you get completeness, Subtract completeness from completeness and you get completeness )
Ishavashya Upanishad
Mahendra Damle
Artists/writer/Educationist
Between Destruction and Abstraction …
For a show that seemingly enshrined objects of the recent past, its title- ‘ Flux’ was direct comment on today’s world by the artist, Nilesh Kinkale. The changing nature of the world we live in is informed by our choices of what we may call ‘ a better lifestyle’. The corollary is rather true : our reliance ( pun unintended ) on newer things is what leaves us with no choice but to switch from older, habitual to the unseen ways of life. Whilst the sheer novelty or ease of handling makes it imperative to use latest technologies and objects that flaunt it; we hardly ever bother about how our organic, aesthetic lifestyle is at stake. Of course, the new technology has to be put to work in place of the time- consuming, environment- unfriendly devices of the past , but have we taken a moment to see our past through those innumerable objects that we have done away with?
The 20-odd works in Nilesh Kinkale’s solo show that took place in Mumbai’s Jehangir Art Gallery provided many such moments, one at a time. Apart from the moments it facilitated, what was the show about? Was it about nostalgia? Was it a lament on a bygone aesthetic sense ? Did it romanticise the redundant ?
No, as the artist’s practice would tell us. Nilesh , from the days he attended Sir J J School of Art , had been painting & sculpting objects of everyday . His early influence was that of Prabhakar Barwe, as in case of countless students in JJ back in mid- 1990s . When Nilesh attended his Masters classes, it was evident that he was drawn more toward the structures of objects and more importantly, to the basic relationship of form to the object’s function. Nilesh’s table-fan with three ‘heads’ , a student-day sculpture now destroyed, was not only a mimesis of the oscillating function of the fan, but a quest to go beyond personification of an object, making inroads of abstraction in a given structure. The Bombay Abstractionists have long been on the scene, giving spritual, poetic and sensuous dimensions mostly to abstract paintings, but Nilesh – like his predecesors Dilip Ranade and Madhav Imaratey, seemed to have avoided the easily available route. If this was Nilesh’s journey so far, it’s present manifestations looked stronger.
At the gallery, the frames were put on pedestals at various heights, with lights focused on each frame. The usual equations like frame- flatness, pedestal – sculpture were thus broken at the first sight, paving way for a closer look at Nilesh’s works that were neither flat nor sculptural. In the frames, there were objects of the recent past, treated for flattening to the maximum possible levels and then inundated in materials like cement, fiberglass or tar. They were objects like cameras, compass, alarm clock which have lost their existence to smartfones, as well as other objects like kerosene stove, wood-fired copper boiler for water, coal-operated iron for clothes that are now regarded as environment – unfriendly and fuel-inefficient. Brass , an alloy that made its presence felt from everyday kettles to the ceremonial trumpets, has lost it to plastic and steel. While Nilesh’s frames had all of them flattened, the title of each work reaffirmed the existence of the object by naming it. The identity of the objects was defaced and decreased, but the suggestive, subtle clues revealed it. Thus, while the flattened stove looked like any other flattened brass pot at the first instance, it’s stand and burner cried – this is not a pot. The cameras showed their distinctive fronts, the copper boiler retained its largeness, the brass kettle spoke out with its pout, the clock – though badly broken- invited a viewer to read between its tiny toothed wheels, the Bhopu horn kept its rubber part intact, and a the oil-measuring jug had not lost its triangularity.
Even as their three-dimensional existence was oblivious, the artist saw to it that the shapes do not get completely lost. This balance between destruction and abstraction was visible in each of the frames, and perhaps more so in a frame that had a typewriter. To use Prabhakar Barwe’s parlance , each frame had a pictorial and non-pictorial part ( ‘ chitra aani achitr ‘ in Marathi) . In Nilesh’s works, while the non-pictorial part was required to hold the object in a frame and various materials from fiber to cement to tar had to be used according to the weight of the object, it was also a site of artistic intervention. This intervention was not restricted to the colour-scheme or such mundane requirements, and went on to create a melancholy mood, to set a battleground for lost function and sustained form.
The museum-like display, the choice of objects, made an instant call to nostalgia which the artist may not have intended. However, while a viewer looked at each frame, Nilesh made his point clear: his abstraction here is not only about controlled destruction, but also about the rustic, rugged aesthetics of the forgotten existences.
Abhijeet Tamhane
Press
Kinkale Studio 