‘ I think M F Hussain should dare it and return to India. Let’s see if they’re going to arrest a 92-yr-old man and chuck him in jail ’

PAMELA PHILIPOSE: On the freedom of expression, the treatment accorded to artist M.F. Hussain could be described as shabby. Why is it that there isn’t enough outrage within the artist community?

There has been outrage, there has been great outrage, we’ve all spoken, we’ve spoken on TV, we’ve written about it. There are people who have approached the powers-that-be but — short of, say, a presidential pardon, or something like that — I don’t see how (it can go further). The whole thing has become very complex.

PAMELA PHILIPOSE: But a pardon, by its very definition, would mean there was something wrong.

No, a pardon for the crimes alleged. Because there are — I’m not sure of the numbers — many cases registered against him.

PAMELA PHILIPOSE: So a premier artist can be hounded out of this country in this manner! It’s an affront to democratic India, isn’t it?

It is indeed. And the artist community, the creative community, is very much aware of this. We’ve done our best to try and get him back. In fact, I feel that he should just dare it and come back. Let’s see if they’re going to arrest a 92-year-old man and chuck him in prison.

AMITABH SINHA: Are you aware of instances in which artists are actually changing their works because they face attacks?

It’s not so much artists. But there are galleries that wouldn’t want to risk showing work that is in any way offensive. I have a different take on the Baroda (Vadodara) issue. It has more to do with commercialisation and commodification of the market. Since Baroda is where cutting-edge art is coming out from, galleries are descending on the city a month before the Faculty of Fine Arts, M.S. University, holds its final exams, just the way companies descend on IIMs to hire bright students. Now this particular artist, I think he said to himself — I don’t know this for sure, but some teachers there have endorsed this — that, ‘Now’s the time the galleries will be coming. It’s my only chance to get noticed, and I’ve got to do something sensational that will catch the eye of the galleries.’ I blame the galleries, I blame the university for allowing it: the final exam is supposed to be an in camera thing, but they allowed galleries to come and see the works and start buying it. I think that’s what went wrong. I’m being a bit of a devil’s advocate in saying that there was fault on that side as well and even that the painting was very provocative and unexplained.

KAVITA CHOWDHRY: You’ve talked about how art has become commercialised. But don’t you think it has moved away from the masses?

Art was never for the common man — never ever in the history of the world. When you talk of famous manuscripts and miniature paintings, only the emperor himself owned miniatures and manuscripts. No one owned art. Not until the merchants of Europe started to buy art did art spread to common folk. Before that it was either the church or kings who were patrons of art. Art was either for public places or to be collected privately by royalty. I think we are lucky we are living in an era in which there’s printing. I don’t think art was ever meant to be owned by the public.

COOMI KAPOOR: You are a trustee of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for Arts (IGNCA). It’s been about 20-25 years since it came up and a huge amount of land, a huge amount of money has been invested. Would you say that the country has got returns from the kind of investments we made?

I have to say that I was a very frustrated trustee of the IGNCA in the three years I was there. I fought and fought and fought but at the end of it, I think I have to say that I did not succeed. I was fighting a lone battle, I had very little support to ask the question: Why do we need 30 acres in the heart of Delhi, if it’s only going to be another archive, which is exactly what it is? The brand new building that has come up has cost crores and crores of rupees. First and foremost, the building was a terrible mistake in design — it had tiny windows, not a single fan, and depends entirely on central air conditioning. It remained closed for two and a half years because it didn’t have the money to run the air conditioning plant or get the electricity or pay the bills. But apart from that, my biggest quarrel was that it’s called the Indira Gandhi National Institute for the Arts, which sounds a bit like the Kennedy Centre for the Arts, but one expected it will be a vibrant place that encourages the arts in general. At the end of those years, I would say the Centre is almost anti-contemporary. There’s no contemporary art ever shown. None of the great contemporary Indian artists have merited a publication from the Centre and everything they do is in camera. One of my battles there was to say that their wonderful library of tapes and films should be available to the public. It’s unbelievable there’s no public membership of that library. Once in a while it will hold an exhibition on an esoteric subject. And it was overloaded with staff who did nothing but lie around on the lawns and drink chai or smoke beedis.

JOEL RAI: You said one of the greatest struggles of an artist is to establish a signature. In Orham Pamuk’s book My Name is Red, he talks about how the miniaturist tradition has been for the artist to subdue himself in art. Even the greatest miniaturists curbed their own individuality in the name of art. Today we know Anjolie Ela Menon, Hussain, Sabavala, but not their works. Who is greater, Anjolie Ela Menon or her work?

Her work, I should hope. I think this is also a disadvantage arising from the media making stars out of artists. Look at Ajanta and Ellora or even Khajuraho. Do you see any artist’s name? Some of the greatest art was created anonymously. The artist as a star is a twentieth century phenomenon. Look at early Christian art, it was all nameless. Great Buddhist art was anonymous too.

AMITABH SINHA: Coming back to the question of style, how do you explain why the market is flooded with abstracts today? Not many painters are doing figuratives. Even beginners take abstracts as the easy route. How do you see that trend?

I don’t think painting abstracts is necessarily easy. In fact it’s harder.

AMITABH SINHA: Yes, but the perception is that it’s easy. And that you don’t have to reason or explain it.

It’s not easy. You can take a Gaitonde and you can take a mock or wannabe Gaitonde and you’ll see the difference. In fact, it’s much harder to be a great abstract painter because when you have a figure or an object it immediately grabs you, it’s saying something very specific whereas an abstract painting, it’s just pure aesthetics and it’s harder to reach, it’s much harder to reach. It takes much longer for a young artist who’s painting abstracts. You’re dealing with just pure space, pure colour, and it has to be very, very good to be good.

AMITABH SINHA: It’s also about the meaning of art. Do all art forms necessarily have a hidden meaning? We read about something, or an art review will try to interpret it a certain way. Does the interpretation always fall in line with what the artist was thinking? Or maybe it doesn’t have any meaning at all, it was just a visual treat for the eye?

If you talk about installation art — I’m surprised nobody asked questions about that — I think the very point is that it has to be meaningless. I was in New York recently, where there was this big exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. The big genre is video art. We went into this darkened room and I sat on a bench and there was this guy who is getting up in the morning and he rubbed his eyes and then he went, and then he brushed his teeth and then he shaved and then he put on his shirt and then he goes to a café and he sits there and he drinks 3-4 cups of coffee. It’s a hell of a long time sitting there watching this guy and then he gets up from there and then a friend comes and chats with him. After 15 minutes of this we said there’s got to be a climax to this or its got to come to a boil somewhere. Or when is it going to end, or is there going to be an explosion now or is he going to suddenly take off his clothes and roll in the sand? But, it just went on like that and then it ended. That’s taking art to the very other extreme.

PAMELA PHILIPOSE: Take Damien Hurst, with his sheep and rotting carcasses. He’s made a huge reputation out of it.

That’s the extreme to which art took you. After that they have started asking, ‘Has art ended?’ You had things developing in front of you (as a work of art). For example, you put fungus and let it grow. In Hurst’s rotting canvases you could see maggots. It reflected that human beings do have a fascination for horror. Prafulla Mohanty, one of our artists who now lives in London, said that in Indian art, they only paint pretty pictures. And the question came up, ‘Why this horror in western painting?’ Prafulla said that in India we just have to look out of the window and the horror is all around us. For the west, life has become so sterile they don’t experience any kind of pain. He said every human actually has a need for the visceral. Somewhere in us — it may be secret for some of us — but there’s somehow a need to encounter reality, blood, spit, shit. Therefore, the west is creating horror in their pictures and the east, which sees horror all the time, creates escapist pictures. At that time, in the 1970s, it was a valid argument. But I think some youngsters are now painting horrible pictures too.

SONU JAIN: Do events taking place in India — say the demolition of Babri Masjid — have an impact on your painting? Do your works reflect events?

It depends. Hussain really responds to events. We teased him in the past and called him the artist laureate of the government when he painted Indira Gandhi as Durga upon a tiger. But he records events, floods, famines. Some do, some don’t. I paint from deep emotions. I always say, ‘I don’t know why people like my paintings because it’s a selfish pastime, a selfish occupation that I do only for myself.’ The fact that afterwards, it’s hung and bought and sold, liked or not liked, is another event altogether. For me, the event is the creation of the painting.

SHAILAJA BAJPAI: You said in an interview that apart from painters, film makers Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman were great influences on you.

Yes, during my years in Paris, I was more influenced by film than art. I tremendously envy film makers, because film is really the medium of today, much more than painting or other arts.