Of art the liberator

 Artist Satish Gujral at work. 
 
 
By Vijay Phanshikar :
“Art should liberate, not bind.” 
- Satish Gujral,
iconic painter, sculptor, 
muralist, architect and author. 

HIS medium changed, but not his pursuit of bringing into artistic expression the inner, abstract form that nudged him from within. In each of his artistic outing -- whether on canvas or on stone or metal or walls or buildings etc -- all the versatile genius of Satish Gujral tried to achieve was sculpting of the form his emotion was trying to assume. Of course, each artist -- in whatever domain of medium -- does the same thing, one may say. There need not be any debate on this. For, art is actually a channel through which emerges the innermost emotion of the practitioner for consumption of the outside world. Yet, in Satish Gujral’s case, his romancing with different mediums was like the struggle to choose appropriate physicality for the inner form. In his later years, he did stop his architectural forays, all right, for whatever reason. Yet, even as he painted or sculpted or created classy murals (that were confluences of painting and sculpting) or wrote fine prose that had the lilt of poetry, Satish Gujral’s effort to offer clue to the connoisseur to interpret his art without any binding of form or medium.

 

 

 

Art should liberate, not bind, he would insist. Of course, the connoisseur does have the full freedom to interpret art in any manner. At an abstract art exhibition at Mumbai’s Jahangir Art Gallery years ago, this scribe heard a celebrated connoisseur confide with another saying, in effect, ‘I am feeling absolutely numb and dumb. My mind is in a tumult. My emotions are swirling. But I am not able to define those’ -- as the twosome got engaged in viewing closely a Gaitonde piece. Such a condition, too, is part of freedom that may refuse to allow the art to offer a definable form to rising emotion while viewing the piece. There is, of course, nothing abstract or occult about this condition many connoisseurs experience. That is the element of freedom art is supposed to offer -- ideally ! True, there is a school of thought that art must have a larger message that the human society needs.

 

But there is no contest or contradiction between any schools of thought about art. Art must have a larger message, is welcome. But art should not bind the connoisseur but liberate him/her, is also equally sensible. In many cases, the sense of freedom art offers is itself the message. Artists -- no matter the medium -- have often struggled with the definition of idea, ideology and ideal of art. This churning has added a philosophical charm to the world of art and its practitioners. That churning has -- beyond doubt -- enriched art as a whole, as can be sensed from the small but meaningful definition offered by Satish Gujral that Art should liberate, not bind.