July 2008

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A walk down memory lane: Connaught Place

July 14, 2008 in Personal

The romance of a Delhi summer can be savored by conjuring up just one image – the vast cool corridors of Connaught Place.

The Raj era building, built between 1928 and 1934 – though formally opened in 1931, was based on the designs of World War I veteran Robert Tor Russell, Chief architect to the Public Works Department. Russell had worked in India before the War as an assistant to the famous John Begg, who along with George Wittet is generally credited for developing the Indo-Sarcenic style. Thankfully, due to exigency or choice, none of the Begg’s influence invaded Russell’s design aesthetic, which was dominated by the understated yet stately stucco neo-classical style popularized by Sir Edwin Lutyens. Russell’s aesthetic however did carry distinct echoes of Italian architecture- The opulent gracefully executed Tuscan loggias on both on both levels (the upper level structures have been increasingly converted into offices) being the defining features of Connaught Place.

Growing up in the eighties, Connaught Place, with its massive arcaded colonnades, circular columnar geometry which was never oppressive, upscale if slightly dowdy shops (as opposed to ‘upscale’ shops now which have interior designs that are almost always preternaturally youthful) with humming air conditioners (when air conditioners were a rarity) – was a constant source of wonder and awe. It was also the only place where one saw foreigners in Delhi – they, almost always in their sunglasses and shorts, walking unhurriedly yet purposefully.

Going to Connaught Place meant going through India Gate and parts of Lutyens Delhi. As we neared India gate, the temperature dropped a few degrees as bus gathered pace and air shed its molten edge in the leafy embrace of trees, and over the grassy expanse of the maidans. Suddenly the furrowed brow of the bus passengers relaxed as we entered the non-gridlocked, beautiful, stately, tree lined Delhi, and a near bonhomie was restored.

Getting down at Barakhamba Road, I remember always taking a few seconds to take in the faint yet pleasant excitement of being in this glorious commercial hub, feeling happy, and almost dreamily becoming aware of the pleasant rush of traffic and how the car horns sounded different – more sonorous, here. However, the two things that I remember most about going to Connaught Place are the shoe shops and Nirula’s. If mom wanted a sandal, it had to be from the Liberty shop in Connaught Place, and the Bata shop there was considered absolutely irreplaceable for men’s shoes. The air-conditioned Nirula’s with its exotic pizzas, which never tasted good but were ravenously consumed, and burgers, and ice-creams was heaven, albeit a heaven in which the feet and heart were as timorous as excitement complete.

On the way back home at night, happy with the day, the relatively empty bus with its dull yellow light seemed positively romantic. As we passed the ice-cream wallahs with their fluorescent lights covered in colored cellophane, and the strolling families, near India gate, the adventure was complete.

The art and artifice of Frida Kahlo

July 9, 2008 in Art

Roughly one third (fifty five) of Frida Kahlo’s paintings were self-portraits. The sheer number and preponderance of self-portraiture in her body of work is unmatched excepting perhaps Munch, Rembrandt, and Gogh. Comparing her output of self-portraits to other artists however does little to shed light on the particularities of her self-portraiture – which is deeply self-involved, celebrity like, romantic (if tragically), directly asking for viewer’s sympathy in ways that drain the viewer, and sprinkled with carefully orchestrated artifice and exaggeration – the conjoined brow, the carefully painted hair over the lip, the Tehuana dress – all of which serve as contorted symbols of personal need (and delusion) than anything broader.

Frida Kahlo was born to a wealthy German father and a Spanish-American mother in 1907. (It is hence unsurprising that Salma Hayek, a rich dilettante of mixed ancestry with little trace of native blood – Hayek is the daughter of a rich Lebanese father and Spanish mother – played her in a popular movie biopic.) The point about non-native bourgeoisie ancestry is important because Kahlo so self-consciously and unceasingly peddled the native roots in her dress, and her art.

For years rumors swirled (no doubt sustained by her) that her father was Jewish. Carl Wilhelm Kahlo, instead, was a born in 1871 in Pforzheim, Germany to Lutheran parents, whose similarly Lutheran antecedents have been traced back to the 16th century by Gaby Franger and Rainer Huhle in their book, Fridas Vater: Der Fotograf Guillermo Kahlo. (Reviewing the book for JPost, Meir Ronnen, wrote – ‘Frida’s favorite subject was herself (she made a trademark of her eyebrows).’ Never perhaps has a simpler formulation of Frida been offered – the childish self-regard, and the commercialism.)

Biography

Kahlo grew up in a gorgeous colonial house, one she returned to during the last years of her life, with access to all the contemporary amenities, the only dark stain being her contracting polio at the age of five. Polio however didn’t leave her handicapped, or her legs as grotesquely disfigured as it does for countless other poorer people.

Coursing through her solidly bourgeoisie life, at 15, Kahlo entered the premedical program at the National Preparatory School in Mexico City. At 18, she had a catastrophic street car accident suffering multiple fractures including damage to the spine, a damaged uterus, and a punctured pelvis. Kahlo never really recovered from the horrific injuries even after going through as many as 35 operations, and continued to live in pain.

Three years after her accident, during which she had started to paint, she met Diego Riviera, the celebrated muralist, and soon after started a romance with the 42 year old artist. A year later, the two were married. The major (and minor) events of the dramatic relationship between Kahlo and Riviera with its numerous infidelities – including Diego’s affair with Frida’s sister Christina, and Frida’s relationship with Trotsky – are well known and well documented. Riviera had a significant impact on her art and politics and politics in art. The crisp outlines to her figures are much in the style of Diego Rivera. Similarly, the way she colors some her paintings echoes the flat coloring in Rivera murals.

The other significant aspect of her life was the political environment that she grew up in. Kahlo grew up at a time when Mexico was in turmoil. Mexican Revolution had begun in 1910 and continued to fester far after 1920. Influenced partly by the politically charged communist learning environment and her association with Riviera, a painter of ‘heroic’ murals with folk art echoes, her paintings incorporated techniques from native Mexican art, and used it to offer none particularly incisive political commentary.

Echoes of Kahlo

“Frida Kahlo has been the right artist at the right time,” said Gregorio Luke, director of the Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA) in California in his 2002 interview with Stephanie Mencimer of the Washington Monthly.

For an era so dearly in search of unimpeachable arty exotic celebrity ‘progressive’ symbols, Kahlo is indeed perfect. Her bisexuality makes her ‘progressive’, her clothes, jewelry and her ‘looks’ make her lusciously ‘exotic, her connections and flirtations with communism and communists make her more appealing still, and her being an artist does nearly everything else.

Kahlo excels as the embodiment of symbolically political hippy chic enmeshed with the exotic romanticism of a Mediterranean country. The fact that her art is transparent is an additional perk. What is left for denouement and understanding, then, is the artist herself, and there the store is rich and endless. But that is saying things somewhat incorrectly- it isn’t due to absence of complexity that people yearn for biography, people yearn for biography when faced with images of celebrity. Her recognizable self-portraits with the repeated motifs of conjoined brow, hair over the lip, the native dress, the hairstyle, and traditional jewelry, work well in an era of celebrity.

After disappearing from the mainstream art world, Kahlo was rediscovered by the feminists in the late 1970s. Soon after, Kahlo got a more popular audience through Hayden Herrera’s famous 1983 biography. Since then, an explosion of Kahlo-inspired films, plays, clothing, and jewelry have transformed the artist into a ‘veritable cult figure’. (National Museum of Women in the Arts)

Exhibitions of her art, including one at SF MoMA, continue to propagate the part celebrity, part artist understanding of hers by blurring lines blurring lines between her personal life and her art. They do so by simultaneously exhibiting family photos, and details of her life. This all means that Kahlo today is more of a (pop) cultural statement than an artistic one.

Kahlo’s Art

Kahlo is a reasonably good painter. That is if you accept that her paintings will always carry marks of self-absorption, plaintiff psychological overtones, melodrama, and celebrity. In fact, her paintings are seen best with those afflictions. She is best when she captures the pathos and melodrama like she does in ‘The suicide of Dorothy Hale’. The painting, drawn on commission from the dead girl’s dad, shows the girl falling from the building but always looking at the viewer, accusing. It is only occasionally that Kahlo is capable of moving beyond that limited oeuvre as she does with ‘Portrait of Dona Rosita Morillo’ where she presents an old matriarch with solemn respectability though with a strangely distracted expression. Perhaps the answer to the distracted expression lies with some psychologist, as it does for many other things that pertain to Kahlo and her art. I for one have only limited interest.

The new caste system: when pretensions must rescue

July 7, 2008 in General

It is hard if not impossible to tolerate, much less empathize, and patently ridiculous to even think to romanticize, a rich philistine with a paunch. This feeling is shared by not only certain sections of the high society – the only part of society that gets to write, express, and define contempt for all of ‘us’, but by all society.

Among the people of these ‘subaltern’ groups, the ones who haven’t been cleansed by the washcloth of high culture, there is a feeling of inadequacy if not disgust with oneself. They must acknowledge the impossibility of ever joining the erudite, English speaking, trim, Westernized, ever progressing and ever progressive, posh group. The chasm only seems to grow wider every day. Sometimes that impossibility takes the form of anger – who are these people feeling so uppity about their new found pretensions? Their beginnings were probably as vulgar than mine. (Caste and class – the last refuge of the bastards. ) It is as if caught in their pretensions – they have executed a double exile – alienating themselves from their roots, and sending us prematurely to our cultural exiles. But then ‘culture’ was largely lost – if not in migration then in constant contortions needed to feed the ‘family’ since then – so what is left now is an idea of culture, and this hunger – this vast orifice that wants to go on consuming. There is no escaping from it. Perhaps these kids are right, we have nothing to offer. So if they find pretensions of West and find home in it, then so be it. If only, they didn’t humiliate us. How dare they?

Among the manicured words crafted by high intellect, a philistine is ever so precisely caught in a pincer like grip, stripped, and exposed for who he is for who he is – a rat, a cheat, a miser, someone who is ugly, fat, debased, lustful, probably impotent, unblinking and stupid. There is nowhere to run.
We have all seen likes of him for the one thing about philistines is that they all look alike. In the oily paunchy sunburned carcass, there is no vestige of culture, no literacy in the “in” books, and no appreciation of the finer aspects of life. I can sympathize with the poor. They may be romanticized for their ‘simplicity’ and their poverty. They at least don’t invade. But how can one live with people with such overreach, such humdrum mediocrity, such precocious grabbing lust, such vulgarity, such hunger? Where does one go to soothe his cultivated sensibilities?

A philistine is like a ‘ghee’ stain on a Dostoevsky. It defines my connection to all that is vile and deformed, all that I want to escape for the safety of harmonic refinement. When did these people become so vile? How did I not notice before how they had encroached on culture and the air itself, and carved up their names on it like low class Romeos. (Accusations of caste and class fly back.) They are like cockroaches on the bathroom drain cover – too filthy to be squished, too filthy to be tolerated, forever to be despised.

Will they find me out? I torture over whether there exists the possibility of being good enough, whether one so completely learn all the parlor tricks that it iron outs the ugly wrinkles of low breeding, whether I can stand any scrutiny and be affirmed of higher birth, higher learning, one of them. There is always that wracking doubt that somehow the occasional word in the wrong accent, the inability to use chop sticks, will conspire and give away the years of low existence and expose you for the philistine you are. There is always that threat, if one grows up and takes up the pretensions. It is one thing if you grow up with it. Otherwise you grow up anxious and eager to stamp every little echo of your own vile history, eager to disassociate with all that is debased in your own bloodline. That is all you can do.

One day, they catch themselves staring at the mirror, and find a tired sunburned unhealthy face, the distorting paunch, their brow wrinkles when they think about the constant demands of family and friends caught in their own vicious cycles, and realize the absolute impossibility of doing better. To be branded a philistine is much like being accused of the original sin – however much you may try, you cannot rinse it off. You must acknowledge the impossibility of transcending it.

It is infinitely easy to be casually vicious, and generally feted if done with faux consideration. But writing hence pursued is a failed enterprise. It then becomes nothing more than carrying class pretensions. The mark of good writing may not be redeeming humans, whom the dominant cultural script has left warped, but bringing to light the lived emotional and social experience of people, and the historio-socio-cultural contexts remains the key to it. This ability – to write well- continues to rest upon both ones’ ability to look into oneself, and into others, and ability to look from other person’s perspective.