BETWEEN ABSTRACTION & EMPATHY IN SARATH CHANDRAJEEWA’S VISUAL PARAPHRASES – PART II
by Dr. Santhushya Fernando,
Dr. Laleen Jayamanne and Professor Sumathy Sivamohan
We, three academics, coming from three different intellectual disciplines (Medicine, English Literature, Theatre and Film Studies) worked alongside each other here so as to understand this mysterious process of a ‘will to abstraction’ or non-objective art, evident in Sarath’s work. None of us are art historians but are learning on the run its diverse histories and theories relevant to our topic. Of the three of us, Santhushya and Sumathy have seen the exhibition, while Laleen has seen it telescopically, only on her computer and in the paper Catalogue to the exhibition, from Sydney.
So, she believes that the other two friends and colleagues are her microscopic eyes. All of us know Sarath’s work (artistic and scholarly) to some degree, and have worked with him but Santhushya has known him intimately since childhood as well. Sumathy contributed a poem and a photograph of and a poem by her sister Rajani to the Jaffna Doors and Windows book, a collective multi-ethnic project conceived and produced by Sarath. Laleen however, though she has written on Sarath’s work, has never met him nor spoken with him or seen his work with her own eyes.
But before the angel of death calls, she hopes to visit the Sri Lankan High Commission in Canberra to see his large figurative clay mural of folk traditions, celebrating our multi-ethnic Island home. It is a contribution to Australian culture too which has nourished several distinguished Lankan artists (Dharmasena and Milinda Pathiraja), and scholars (Michael Roberts, Neville Weerarathne, Anoma Pieris), and provided some with a hospitable home in an expansive multi-cultural ethos.
German Art History and Theory
Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style (1908), is a very popular art history book from which we have borrowed our title. A slim doctoral dissertation, it’s still read and commented on by scholars in its many editions and translations. We find the way Worringer conceptualised the history of art and its genesis useful and cite it here to structure our argument as it has a similar understanding of pre-historical art as Leroi-Gourhan.
As well, coming from a training in the rigorous German philosophically grounded, philological tradition of aesthetics, he is not shy to speculate on the basis of empirical work, albeit done in the metropolitan ethnographic museums of Imperial Europe enriched by the looted patrimony of faraway colonised countries and peoples. The following summary explains briefly the derivation of the two key ideas structuring this piece.
“What proved to be so timely in Abstraction and Empathy was Worringer’s further claim that this will to abstraction was to be understood to be one of the two fundamental aesthetic impulses known to human culture – the other, of course, being the urge to empathy which manifests itself in the naturalistic depiction of the observable world.
Basing his studies on diverse cultures, styles, and periods, Worringer found “the need for empathy and the need for abstraction to be the two poles of human artistic experience …. They are antitheses which, in principle, are mutually exclusive. In actual fact, however, the history of art represents an unceasing disputation between the two tendencies.” Hilton Kramer, Introduction to Abstraction and Empathy.
We frame our piece with these two interdisciplinary ideas of abstraction and empathy, formulated by Leroi-Ghouran and Worringer. Sarath’s paintings shuttle between these two impulses, the purely abstract pole of mark making and colour and also a mixed figurative mode or semi-abstraction. Thinker in Front of The Empty Doorway and The Ascetic are among the latter.
His pure colour fields appear not to be ‘abstract’ so much as the place where our brain encountering colour might experience a ‘pure affect’; the emergence of some new quality, which we critics have to struggle to name. There is no possible ‘empathetic’ response here because colour in such a field derails habitual mechanisms of recognition of a familiar object. There is nothing there to empathise with through recognition of the familiar. The statement by Cezanne which frames this piece makes sense in this specific context; ‘Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet’. Colour makes one vibrate with intensity if one yields to it.
Marx’s work on the economy is abstract; and his abtract is the most concrete too; about matter, wages, exchange, capital. Laleen, you trace art through the materiality of human evolution, of the body, the brain and cognition as social evolution. I am so much in the here and now. I can only see the hand that works, with its material, and the artist in a relationship with the world around her, in her surroundings and in her place as an artisan.
So, the artist is an artisan after all. This shuttling back and forth between the artist and artisan, without rest and without the dichotomy and distinction ever resolved, is what we embrace I think, not as art, not as artisanal craft, but as a reflective, intimate space, in which we can reside and reflect. Not to freeze material, the labour of the craftsperson and the artist to reverberate through the meanings they can generate at that moment. The classic distinction between the abstract and the realist may have to be dissolved here as well.
All art has to be abstract at one level, for it is not immediately palpable, real or intimate. It is a form of writing after all. So, the question of abstract and realist art as distinct forms troubles me. Working in film, like Laleen, I am also very profoundly aware how a verisimilitude, animates realist art, undone by what we see in abstraction. Laleen says that she is drawn to the stature of the Thinker that Sarath has.
We already have the figure of the Thinker in Rodin. Do we immediately know to make those connections, and therefore think of the Thinker? Or is it a MAN holding himself in a ‘thoughtful’ pose which kindles that idea? Sarath’s art is abstract – but they build on the ideas of palpable forms of the real – images of the war that have come to be both tactile material, like the wood, and have come to stand for the dislocation of war.
At the exhibition, there are several paintings of Doors and Windows, in splatters of dark and bright colours, flying in opposite directions but kept together and formed through the materiality of paint and canvas, – this is what makes the abstraction of that painting, so severe and demanding on one to be an insider, in the know, to be let in on a secret. I am neither a painter or an art critic. But I felt that Sarath had quick brush strokes.
They capture the flight of the doors and windows, through the broken roofs and the open roofs of the sky. But they are contained. They can never fly away. We are constrained by our thoughts, and our bodies, compelled to reflect on the here and now. Why am I here, now at this exhibition. Why am here in the middle of an exhibit?
Bronze Statues and Body-Counts
Sumathy, you mentioned that you came down to Colombo that evening, after teaching at Peradeniya, and arrived straight from the station lugging your bags, to attend the special viewing for invitees, a collective celebration. It was important for you to be there. You mention Sarath’s recent commemorative statue of Sir Ivor Jennings and pose a generative question. What did he see as he strode forward, in planning a visionary public University for independent Lanka on that magnificent location?
But, because Sarath made a statue of former president Premadasa, he has been permanently blacklisted by the gate keepers of important art institutions, both locally and internationally, thereby erasing him from the Lankan art historical record. I have attempted to talk about his work with a few Lankan critics and curators and have been repeatedly rebuffed, straining cherished friendships. If we were to do an approximate body-count of just the young intelligentsia killed by our rulers since April 1971, then several other statues now standing proudly, would also have to be toppled.
Is it only the ‘working-class man/thug’ from Maradana become president, who is guilty of mass murder? When Ivor Jennings gazed out with his bronze eyes, at that vista of Paradise which is the Peradeniya campus, he could not have imagined that just within two decades of its founding, bombs would go off in a hall of residence and young men and women’s wounded bodies would be floating down that majestic Mahawali river flowing though the campus.
Fallen Monument
Then I landed on one painting and gazed at it. It is once again of broken forms, but arranged in such a way, that pointed to a space, that I can formulate as home, as Jaffna. But this is Jaffna returned to me, in blacks, whites and punctured colours. I did not know whether I read any of it correctly. So, I kept quiet there. And carefully conveyed that idea to Laleen, who pounced on it as a seminal thought. The shape of Jaffna is distinctive, for those who gaze upon maps of Sri Lanka and have been made to gaze upon it for the last 30-odd years.
The muted colours of this picture are quite different from the fiery ones of doors and windows that threaten to fly into a nowhere, and forever tied to the present. This is the abstraction perhaps I can speak of. The abstraction of generative readings, that take us elsewhere, in the bond between artist and subject as I have noted above, but also in the bond between the body of the viewer stretched within the spaces of the painting, as she tried to take it all in, in one fell scoop, but cannot. For one has to reflect, think, and formulate.
(To be concluded)
