Karnataka art: The endangered legacy

Putting together over 200 works for the mammoth art exhibition at the NGMA took Suresh Jayaram and his two assistants the better part of a year. To their consternation, the state lacked a comprehensive archive of visual art through the decades and their research was gathered largely through oral documentation. 

"A handful of artists, or their families, or the efforts of dedicated individuals were our main sources," said Jayaram, speaking at the NGMA on Wednesday evening. The Lalit Kala Academy, which produces monographs of contemporary artists also provided them with little pockets of information - one of their few institutional sources. "You visit the home, realise the artist is no more and that his work has been distributed. What remains isn't good enough for the show itself." And many a legacy is lost - Jayaram smiles as he recalls an artist they discovered along the way. Yalavatti, they were told, would stack paintings on a hawker's cart, which he would push through the city each day! "I heard that a large number of his paintings lay at a framing shop and arrived there, only to find that they  had just been sold."

Indira Chowdhury, of the Center for Public History at the Srishti Institute of Art and Design, set up her first archive at TIFR in Mumbai, which housed a respectable collection of the Bombay Progressives. "It starts with how we define the term," she said. "Do we associate it with a particular region, set of beliefs or traditions? Would it have photos, films or sketchbooks as well," she asked. 

Karnataka doesn’t lack sources so much as access, says artist Ravikumar Kashi. “Entering the archive at the Vidhana Soudha is as challenging as meeting with a politician there. Also, their microfilming process only works in black-and-white.” The ideas of identity and historical context cannot be seen in isolation from a work of art, especially in Karnataka where the art is amalgamation of influences from across the country. “Even Facebook is an inadvertent archive,” he said.

"Archiving is a complex process and should be the responsibility of art academies," said senior artist S.G. Vasudev. Ananya Drishya, of which Vasudev is a founding member, currently has one of the state's only archives for visual art. But it's a lot of work and institutions aren't as bound by financial restrictions as the rest of us."