Name Game

This odd behaviour is an old one. In an essay, the great art historian E.H. Gombrich cites an ancient Greek writer who says that “archaic artists had to write on their pictures `this is a horse’, `this is a cow’, to make them intelligible.” (`Topics of Our Time; available in Timeless Art Book Studio, New Delhi.) Certainly making things intelligible or giving them an identity is one crucial aspect of the act of naming the Name. In fact, Gombrich cites various other aspects and functions of the act. These are valid, but broadly speaking all names can be classified between the two poles of ambiguity and specificity. The later type is easy to identify. When a painter like Anguissola, an extraordinarily talented woman artist of the sixteenth century, calls a work a self-portrait we connect, without questioning, the name to the painting even though none of us have seen Anguissola.

The opposite happens when we look at Munch’s `Madonna’ — an expressionist semi-nude, hair loose, holding a sensuous, tragic pose. Munch’s Oedipal mother does not fit the time-honoured image of the Madonna. The name though specific is rendered ambiguous by the specificity of the Image; the contradiction is an invitation to the viewer to explore and speculate. An example from nearer home shows how erasing this contradiction can also become an exercise in exhibitionism and help to provoke dangerous passions.

When an artist draws a woman playing a veena the image is an ordinary one and can succeed only to the extent of how the artist renders it. If the artist goes a step further and disrobes the woman then an element of eroticism comes in. When the naming of the Name is done and the artist writes `Saraswati’ under the drawing then the matter-of-fact drawing becomes a matter of state, society and art. In the heat of the battle what no one notices is that the issue is not only about artistic freedom but goes into the heart of the artistic practice of naming the Name: in this work by Husain the specificity of the Name and the specificity of the Image leaves no room for interpretation. The absence of ambiguity both in the name and the image marks also the absence of any invitation to explore, speculate and interpret; it becomes an inadvertent summons to all the base instincts of humanity.

The ambiguous name provokes just the opposite feeling. An example is the type of names which Barnett Newman gave his works. In most cases the Name bears no visible relation to the Image. The utter ambiguity is an invitation to decode the painted message. The reverse of this is encountered in the works of Picasso. What is striking here is that the specificity of the Name is matched by the ambiguity of the Image. This is especially true of the Cubist works where the Name, specific and precise (e.g. `The Glass of Bear’), invites us to decode the Image formed by near-monochromatic planes, cylinders and triangles. Again,this is an invitation to explore. In the works of Duchamp we encounter the Name which has to be decoded first before one can attempt to decode the Image. His verbal dexterity enabled Duchamp to play word against word so much so that the naming of the Name became a creative act near equal to the creation itself. The delight of viewing a Duchamp lies in the double decoding which we have to do.

In Magritte’s works the act of naming the name is actually unnecessary because the Image is pictorially perfect. His `portraits’ of ordinary commonplace objects however, carry inscriptions which question, confuse and sometime affirm the reality of the objects depicted. Thus, the line `This is not a pipe’ appears beneath a picture of a pipe, the word `sky’ beneath a handbag and, to cap it all, `sponge’ beneath a sponge! The contradiction between the picture-perfect paintings of Magritte and the inscriptions point to the fact that the Image can also escape the confines of the Name. When this happens the work of art becomes `open’ as Eco said, to multiple interpretations. This is true of most great works of art. The act of naming the Name can bestow many meanings. No-man can be both sense and non-sense.