MARCH 12: Vinod Dave's mixed media works, now showing at SharonApparao's gallery at Triveni Kala Sangam in Delhi, to be followed up byanother exhibition at Apollo Apparao galleries in Mumbai, and then inChennai, may look visually soft, but pose hard questions.The ploy is of taking accepted images of the calendar variety and infusingnew life into them. From this angle, it is no different from the way inwhich Ravi Varma brought the heroes and heroines of Sanskrit epics to lifeas colonial Indians.Dave, however, brings the process up to date. He blends traditional gods andgoddesses with the variety we find in society columns. They are thecelebrities. In doing so, he opens up an ambivalent discourse of a visualdivinity being reflected on the images of celebrities. To the extent thatthis post-modernist ploy allows religion to enter the secular visual artsfrom which it had earlier been expelled, this process detracts from thedevelopment of an art in keeping with the dominance of science and reason inour lives.But the process has another edge. Bringing gods and goddesses to the levelof every-day people opens them up to questioning and even to rejection.Objectively then, this form of visual expression is neither an unmixedblessing for religion nor for art. The artist is well aware of this when hesays: ``By interpreting popular images of deities into personal statements,I have both paid homage to them and also like an ordinary human being,quarrelled with the gods by viewing them with contemporary sensibilities andturning them into art with a social context.''This ambivalent path gives his soft images their punch-line in a consumeristsociety, but does it help us to get rid of the muck of ages still stickingto our sensibilities and not letting them develop?
