गायतोंडे वाचून...Hello and Goodbye Vasudeo S. Gaitonde

 Jerry Saltz, Vulture, October 18 2018:

“...The lush new art-world documentary The Price of Everything shows us a system so waist-deep in hypermarketing and excess that it’s hard to look at art without being overcome by money, prices, auctions, art fairs, celebrities, well-known artists, and mega-collectors who fancy themselves conquistadors. In this, it’s a lot like most recent accounts of the art world — which are, all told, pretty accurate. I hate this toxic rot and junkie-like behavior. Yet I love art and the art world. I hate the portrait of that world contained in this movie, but I also recognize in it what I love....”

ऑक्टोबर २०१८मध्ये फेसबुक वरील एका जोरदार शिफारशींमुळे 'गायतोंडे', २०१६ हे सतीश नाईक यांनी संपादित केलेले पुस्तक घेतले.

गायतोंडे हे  एका दृष्टीने फार यशस्वी चित्रकार होते अस म्हटले पाहिजे कारण त्यांच्या चित्रांना  आज बाजारात प्रचंड किंमत आहे.  त्याचा उल्लेख पुस्तकात सुरवातीलाच (पृष्ठ ८) आहे.

पुस्तकात गायतोंडेंची काही चित्रे आहेत, त्यांच्या वर लिहलेले लेख आहेत, त्यांच्या मुलाखती आहेत, त्यांचे फोटो आहेत.

गायतोंडे फार मोठे कलावंत असतील पण मला त्यांची पुस्तकातील चित्र फारशी आवडली नाहीत. कळली तर अजिबात नाहीत. (मला दि. वसंत सरवटेंना गायतोंडेंच्या कलेबद्दल विचारायला आवडल असत. पण आम्हाला बोलायला इतर शेकडो विषय असायचे.)

मी हे पुस्तक चाळत, चाळत वाचणार आहे. मुलाखत माझा आवडता वाङ्मय प्रकार असल्याने त्या कडे पहिल्यांदा वळलो.

पृष्ठ १३८वर गायतोंडे म्हणतात : ".... मी हिंसेला सर्जनतेच्या विरोधी मानतो. हिंसा बरोबर घेऊन तुम्ही सर्जनशील कार्य करू शकत नाही असा माझा विश्वास आहे."

"हिंसा बरोबर घेऊन तुम्ही सर्जनशील कार्य करू शकत नाही" अस म्हणण हा पराकोटीचा भाबडेपणा आहे... मी करू शकत नाही म्हणाले असते तर ठीक होत....

युरोप मधील मध्ययुगीन रेनझान्स चळवळ ही हिंसेच्या खांद्यावर उभी आहे. जॉन ग्रे २०११ साली लिहतात:

"..."Don't be so gloomy," said Harry Lime, the sinister anti-hero of Graham Greene's Third Man, "in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." Lime's history may not have been entirely accurate - the Swiss were a notably martial people during the early modern period, for one thing - but in suggesting that the Italian Renaissance was born of savage conflict, he was on to something.

A familiar view has it that, with the Renaissance, a highly civilised part of Europe turned away from medieval fanaticism to embrace a modern notion of the world. The reality was more complicated. The boundaries between medieval and modern in Renaissance Italy were neither clear nor fixed, but intensely contested, with some of the protagonists adopting stances that might seem paradoxical from the perspective of many people today. The ruling passions of the modern world - the ideal of equality and the demand for popular government, for example - were often most clearly visible among the Renaissance's enemies, while the Renaissance was in some ways the opposite of a modern movement...."

गायतोंडे म्हणतात "... भारताबाहेरच्या कलेची मला काही तितकीशी माहिती नाही... " (पृष्ठ १४३) म्हणून भारतातल एक उदाहरण पाहू.

Detail from a mural in Cave One at Ajanta, showing King Mahajanaka, at right

 

Charles and Josette Lenars/Corbis

अजंता वरील त्यांच्या लेखात विल्यम डॅलरिंपल (William Dalrymple) काय म्हणतात ते पहा : 

"...This phase took place after a long period of decline in Indian Buddhism, when the religion was fast heading into extinction in South Asia—like a last bright flicker of the guttering Buddhist lamp. In contrast to the earlier period of community patronage, it is clear that in the age of Emperor Harisena each cave had one single very rich patron—a man like the monk Buddhabhadra, the chief donor of the opulently appointed cave twenty-six, who was clearly a man of considerable wealth: in his inscription he describes himself as “the friend of kings.” As Walter Spink has noted, it is unlikely “that he spent very much time humbly wandering from village to village with his begging bowl as his predecessors in the early days of Buddhism did.”.... 

....Schopen shows how the inscriptions left at Buddhist sites tend to record a far less idealized picture of life in early Buddhist India than the later documents that have been the foundational texts of modern Buddhist scholarship. He points out, for example, that Buddhist monks, far from being the otherworldly creatures often imagined by Western scholars, were frequently extremely worldly and “men of considerable wealth,” running businesses and mints; many were clearly sleeping around, lending money, and writing treatises on such unexpected subjects as inheritance law, medicine, and eroticism; some were even getting into sectarian fights, hoarding weapons, destroying the stupas of rival orders, and abusing and occasionally trying to murder nuns. They were, in other words, not saints but normal human beings...." (NYRB, 2014)

अजंटाच्या शेकडो महान कलावंतांना माहित नसेल श्री. बुद्धभद्र काय करतात ते?

 पृष्ठ १४१वर, प्रमोद गणपत्ये त्यांना विचारतात : "आयुष्यात काही मिळवलंय असं समजता ?", गायतोंडे : "मी '"मी" आहे. हे 'मी'पण मी मिळवलं."

Self-portrait, 1883-1887 by Paul Cézanne (1839- 1906)

हे वाचून माझ्या एका आधीच्या एका पोस्ट ची आठवण झाली: In a wonderful essay on Cézanne's art Jonathan Jones writes in The Guardian on August 11 2017:

"...In a beautiful pairing by the curators, Cézanne in 1885-6 portrays himself in a tall bowler hat (in French it’s a chapeau melon) looking from the side, as if he has just turned round and spotted himself. He looks displeased. This painting has a strong, solid, almost sculptural finish. But then he thinks again. In a second painting he has the same pose and hat but the image is dappled, incomplete, vanishing. Did he really see what he thought he saw? He’s uncertain now. Another unsettling reperception of his own image is a painting from about 1885 based on a photograph taken in 1872. Can the Cézanne who is painting it even be sure he is the same man he was 13 years earlier? He seems far from convinced. One eye in the portrait is almost closed. The figure is isolated in ghostly blue. Who was I, then?
Cézanne not only anticipates Picasso but also Proust and Joyce as he meditates on the nature of the self. We are not continuous beings, his portraits suggest. We are mysteries to ourselves and others, divided and fragmentary behind our masks. He is the true inventor both of modern art and the modern soul."

जॉन ग्रे लिहतात :

"... The threat to liberalism, (Yuval Noah)  Harari believes, comes not from its enemies but from the advance of science. Rightly, he argues that secular liberalism is based on ideas inherited from religion, such as the soul and free will. Neuroscience undermines the belief that human beings have “a single and indivisible self”, and “once we accept that there is no soul, and that humans have no inner essence” the idea of free will no longer makes sense:

. . . when a neuron fires an electric charge, this may be either a deterministic reaction to external stimuli, or it might be the outcome of a random event such as the spontaneous decomposition of a radioactive atom. Neither option leaves any room for free will . . . The sacred word “freedom” turns out to be, just like “soul”, an empty term that carries no discernible meaning. Free will exists only in the imaginary stories we humans have invented.

In the end, human beings aren’t so different from vending machines: “A much more complicated algorithm than the vending machine, no doubt, but still an algorithm . . . The algorithms controlling vending machines work through mechanical gears and electric circuits. The algorithms controlling humans work through sensations, emotions and thoughts.” Like all other living things, human beings are embodied algorithms, programmed by natural selection to produce “copies of themselves”...." (न्यू स्टेट्स्मन, ऑक्टोबर २०१६)

तेंव्हा व्हेंडिंग मशीनला कसल आलय 'मी'पण?....

भारतीय संस्कृतीत तर 'मी' अगदी परका आहे, ती एक माया आहे...जॉन ग्रे : "...We are all bundles of sensations. The unified, continuous self that we encounter in everyday experience belongs in maya. We are programmed to perceive identity in ourselves, when in truth there is only change. We are hardwired for the illusion of self.

We cannot look steadily at the momentary world, for if we did we could not act. Nor can we observe the changes that are taking place incessantly in ourselves, for the self that witnesses them comes and goes in the blink of an eye. Selfhood is a side effect of the coarseness of consciousness; the inner life is too subtle and transient to be known to itself. But the sense of self has another source. Language begins in the play of animals and birds. So does the illusion of selfhood...." ('Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals', 2002)

पृष्ठ १४४वर, गायतोंडे म्हणतात : "मी संपूर्ण कलाकार आहे , त्यामुळे उणिवा असण्याचा प्रश्नच उदभवत नाही...."

हे वाक्य वाचल्यावर , माझा त्यांच्यातला इन्टरेस्टच संपला आणि मी पुस्तक का घेतले (पोस्टेज धरून रुपये . ५४९) असे वाटू लागले....