<History and 'Made in IAS'>

'Made in IAS'                      Jagath Weerasinghe

    Institute of Aesthetic Studies (IAS) is an institute with a history spreading over a century. It has gone through several stages of development, from its earliest inception in the form of a Drawing and Painting Course at the Maradana Technical College in 1896. In 1949 the art courses were moved from the Technical College to a new house at Horton Place known as Heywood, under the supervision of J.D.A. Perera. In 1952, the art courses were formally constituted within an institute titled 'Government College of Arts' and at the same year a Program in Oriental Music and Dance was introduced to the College. It gained its current university status in 1974. Through out its long history, its art department has been on the forefront of Sri Lanka's art scene. The history of the Art Department is associated with such distinguished figures as J.D.A. Perera, David Paynter, Stanley Abeysinghe, Thissa Ranasinghe, Q.U. Saldin, W. Ariyasena, A.K.V. Wijesekara, H.A. Karunaratne, Sarath Surasena and Albert Dharmasiri. Its most recent major contribution to Sri Lanka's art was the works and ideas of Stanley Abeylinghe and H.A. Karunaratne during 1970's and 80's. It needs to be mentioned here that the current art making practice has many aspects deeply rooted in Karunaratne's thinking and influence, even though the younger generations of artists have invented, re-invented and positively challenged his ideas and views on art.

     After a relatively placid, but yet an important period of activity and impact-making on Sri Lanka's art scene, IAS has made a major come-back to the contemporary art scene with a highly energetic and creative group of artists in the 1990's. Looking at this out burst of artistic talent and newer ideas and arguments on art emanating from the IAS, it is obvious that a whole generation of younger artists are making a major theoretical assault on all most all of the established ideas and thoughts on art making. What is even more noteworthy here is that the animators of this high-powered movement are a group of young men and women who were forced to spend their teenage years in a highly chaotic social and political environment in their rural villages and home-towns. These radically new, yet artfully interesting young men and women are attacking the established ideas of excellence in art, from the rural periphery, by positioning their 'bodies' and 'lives' as the crux of the matter of art making! Said in other words, small-town Sri Lanka is impacting its mark in the Colombo's metropolitan art world.

     This exhibition is an attempt at documenting the contribution that is being made by the younger artists from IAS to the '90's trend', and the recent 'explosion' of artistic activity produced within the IAS. However there is a subtler political intention behind this show, that is the proclamation of the potential and the vitality of the home spun intellectual and imaginative resources of Sri Lanka. The potential and vitality of youthful energy when acknowledged and directed towards intellectually informed creativity.

     In a way, most of the works of these young artists seem to portray these young men and women as if they are living with memories of violence, dispossession and despair on the one hand and on the other, as if they are the casualties of the luringly strange beauty and the evasive nature of urban culture. But on the contrary, the prime force that sustain their artistic activities, I would argue, is a struggle that these young men and women are engaged in converting a realization that they are the oppressed, and therefore the under-privileged of a society that gave birth to violence, despair and frustration in all spheres of life, into a dynamism that allows them to surmount despair and gain subsistence in the very society that undesired them in the recent past. In these works, they have transformed the frustrations, despair and alienation ensuing from social-political devastation and urban misimpression and chimera into ways and methods to become consummative and acknowledged in the society.

     It is perhaps possible to argue that the key factor that surfaces from Sri Lanka's contemporary art scene is that a sense of dynamic change has emerged. What is important to note here is that this emergence of a dynamic change is not only happening in the background of a brutal political climate but as well of a background of experiencing the fruits and realities of the new economic policies and developments that were introduced in 1977[1]. As mentioned earlier in this essay, the art scene has emerged from this background, in many ways, is a very youthful one. The contemporary art scene in Sri Lanka is mostly a scene of younger artists who have made their way into the art scene during the past 4-5 years. These younger artists, in their own way, are energizing the contemporary art scene in a highly dynamic manner in relation to a few senior artists[2].

     What is also very important to note here is the fact that these younger artists are not merely playing a role of beneficiaries in a newer trend but those of contributors to a newer trend but those of contributors to a newer trend marks significant development in the history of Sri Lankan modern art. For so many years in the past, the younger generations were growing under the cozy and comfortable shade of senior artists, but currently the situation has changed and the younger artists seem to have acquired the role of leading an art scene in which they are the conscious participants. There is no doubt that the younger artists have added newer dimensions to the current practice of art. In doing this, I would say that these artists are showing artists of today. That is, that they are consciously constructing a 'history of art' of their own, a 'history of art' made and concocted locally!

     It seems necessary to briefly dwell on this idea of 'constructing a history of art of their own' at some length. This phenomenon can only be understood in relation to the project of modernism as presented by the west to the east billeted within colonialism, modernism in art in India and Sri Lanka took the form of an anti colonial stance in the hands of the art practicing elite of the time. Works and ideas of Rabindranath Tagore, George Keyt[3], and many others can be taken as examples for this re-working of modernism as a means of political protest. This, positioning of modernism in art as an anti colonial platform, may seem like an anomaly, if one is caught in the belief that modernism in art as purely a western product. While this is true when looked at modernism in art in the west from a rather shallow developmental history, it falters in functioning as a valid explanatory model in apprehending the significance of diversity in Asian art. However, what is historically and also politically important to us in India and Sri Lanka is the fact that modernism in art was not a Victorian product that justified British colonialism in Southeast Asia. Colonial Britain was not the birthplace of modernism in art; it was France, a country that was historically the antithesis of Britain in many aspects. As such, taking up modernism as means of artistid expression was in itself, I would argue, had the possibility of presenting one as anti-establishment/anti- colonial[4]. In other words, in the context of colonialism in Asia, modernism in art was invented in itself, where it was necessary for cultural and historical relativization, in the hands of alternative and contending power groups. It is probably this historical and political potential of modernism, the potential to be invented in itself, that challenges the west of its claim on sole ownership of modernism; modernism is no more a western idea. Generations of artists and cultural practitioners during and post independence periods in India and Sri Lanka have increasingly reworked the modernist formula in a multitude of ways. It is obvious that modernism has ceased to exist within a singular definition; different power groups in different cultures have defined and reworked the modernism in ways most conducive to their histories and traditions[5]. As such, Asian modernism has its own 'history', and the current art is being produced within this 'history'. Perhaps, what we are experiencing today in Sri Lankan art is yet another attempt by an alternative power group to invent 'modernism in art' in itself, a group who belongs in a generation with no direct memories of the colonial oppressor[6].

     The hall mark of the '90's trend' is that is consciously tries to define art as an expression of 'now' and 'right here', art and art making process as an expression of being contemporary. In other words, a majority of the contemporary artists show a common conviction in their artistic efforts by necessarily placing themselves and their creative energies within the 'current cultural moment' and in its immediate, and less frequently, in distant antecedents. This necessity to be in the 'current cultural moment' states a common idea held, consciously or unconsciously by most of the contemporary artists; that is the refusal of metaphysical narrative that couches a wish to be universal in a theological and trans-cultural sense[7]. This has liberated them from two historical fetters; one from a tradition, which was signified as 'genuinely Sri Lankan' within the anti-colonial and nation-building projects of early and mid 20th century, and second from the confusing belief of art as 'self' or 'soul's expression, where 'self' or 'soul' is defined as an apolitical existence. As such this trend can be defined as an artistic approach attempting to formulate a comprehensive and formal body of aesthetic through which sentiments and sensations of violence and frustration, and tensions and passion of the consumer society, and the material/carnal and visual situations of the urban and rural middle class could be brought in to the domain of high art and of the contemporary affluent society.

     There are several ways to categorize and group the artists in the show and in general the artis of 1990s, in order to grasp the similarities and differences amongst them. They can be grouped according to the use of materials, or according to subject matter or in terms of style. Categorizations are notorious for they make reality look too simplistic and homogeneous. Whatever the categorization one would construct, it will always, either neglect or obscure the complex nature of art making in late 90's. However, for this essay I am proposing a categorization of the artists and art works in terms of their subject matter, it is within this category that one can see the broadest diversity that speaks for a range of complex and subtle psychological dispositions at work. Currently most prevalent subject matter among the contemporary Sri Lankan artists is the investigation of 'self' and the frustration of the individual in the face of organized political crimes. This investigation of the 'self' is also carried out in other spheres, such as in relation to certain traditional and Victorian ideas held by the society at large on 'marriage', 'sex', 'being youth' and 'being women'. One of the most interesting observation one can make here is the alighment of personal pains with those of the society, and thus the artisgt portrays him/herself as the suffering individual on behalf of the other or the society. The other mostly investigated subject matter is the study of the 'city': the urban environment and its residues, consumer culture, modern technology and their pleasure and horrors as well[8].

     In general, from the works and the worded contexts these artists construct around their works, it can be suggested that they in ways peculiar to them reconstruct and present a particular moment of their 'bodies' and 'lives' as art. In other words the works and the verbal contexts they around their art, show subtle, but strong signs of autobiographical narratives. These 'autobiographical narratives' usually hold or tell us of a character that is desolate and dismal, but yet anticipant or of a character that is struggling with some sort of a bondage; a captivity and a perplexity whose location and position is not yet defined, but being defined.

Jagath Weerasinghe

[1]. See Caroline Turner, 'Internationalism and Regionalism; Paradoxes of Identity', Tradition and Change, University of Queensland Press, 1993, p.xv, where she notes, 'The emergence of a sense of dynamic change since late 1980's is a common factor in most of the countries in the Asian region'.
[2]. The senior artists I am referring to here include Kingsley Gunatilake, Jagath Weerasinghe, Tissa de Alwis, Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Anoli Perera and Muhanned Cader.
[3]. See Jagath Weerasinghe, George Keyt: an archaeological excavation to understant (in Sinhala) Theertha, 1. (Vibhavi Cultural Centre, Colombo) 1995, pp. 48-56.
[4]. See Manel Fonseka, Rediscovering Lionel Wendt, Lionel Wendt Photographs, exhibtion catalogue, 27-31 August, Lionel Wendt Art Gallery, Colombo, where she notes of an occasion that clearly exhibits the tension that had existed between the modernists and the British Government sponsored art in colonial Sri Lanka.

[5]. See John Clark, Asian Modernisms, Humanities Research, 2, 199, p. 5-6, where he notes,'… modernity invents itself everywhere it is required for a new relativization of the pasts of any given culture or group of cultures. The principal condition is that these cultures a need to- and are capable of- carrying out this relativezation'.
[6]. It seems now possible to se three major attempts by Sri Lankan modernists at relativizing modernism to their local cultural pasts and presents. First serious attempt was the '43 group'; the second was the works and ideas of H.A. Karunaratne. The third attempt, I would say, is what is happening currently.
[7]. Jagath Weerasinghe, No Glory, Sarath Kumarasiri, Recent Works at Heritage Gallery, 18-36 April 1998.
[8]. It is necessary to mention here that the city and the urban environment were not considered as worthwhile and suitable as themes for art making until the '90's trend' came into being.