मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Friday, March 26, 2010

Can We Trust an Artist to Show us the Reality?

Lalit (ललित) March 2010 carries a review of "leelacharitratil Samjdarshan" (लीळाचारित्रातील समाजदर्शन) by Suman Belwalkar (सुमन बेलवलकर), 2009 by Pradip Karnik (प्रदीप कर्णिक).

I have been planning to buy the book.

I liked the review although I would have liked to see some reference to D D Kosambi's work.

At the end of the review, Karnik quotes this from the book:

"a painter would relate to the nature around him but not necessarily to the social environment." ("चित्रकार त्याच्या भोवतीच्या निसर्गाशी नाते जोडेल परन्तु तो सामाजिक पर्यावरणाशी जोडेलच असे नाही")

Karnik thinks this is not true. Artist also connects with the social environment, Karnik seems to say.

I feel both of them are not entirely correct.

It is likely that the artist doesn't connect even to the nature around him! Read an earlier post on the subject here.

Therefore, we can't trust an artist, particularly a bad one, to reflect truly anything. Neither nature nor social environment.

And are nature and social environment two different things to start with?

Here I strongly recommend an essay by Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे) on the subject of his home-studio: 'Chitrakarachi Kholee' (चित्रकाराची खोली), part of 'Vyangkala-Chitrakala' (व्यंगकला-चित्रकला), 2005.

In Sarwate's rooms, in Kolhapur and Mumbai, nature and society-at-large blend seamlessly. They are one.


Artist: the late JB Handelsman, The New Yorker, 28 February 1994
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