A Bilingual Public Sphere of Visual Art Criticism:
SCRAP BOOK OF CHANDRAJEEWA – Part II
by Laleen Jayamanne
Shirani Rajapakse’s short piece has a delicious bit of visual analysis which brings out the playful nature of Sarath’s mati wada, that most folk of craft practices, loved instinctively by many Lankans. She says, ‘the quaint ornamental structure in the picture looks very much like a bird-house, but it’s not [….] It is a lamp stand which the designer says he was inspired to make after seeing the lamps lighted by many and placed in their gardens as a mark of respect for the gods. My friend and colleague Sarath (who I have never met or talked to), gives me the impression of being a very serious, quiet person.
Therefore, ‘playful’ is not a term I associate with his work that I have studied. But when Shirani described her doubled perception of the lamp stand also as a bird house, what came to my mind were his clay toys, the owl and the pussy cat are delightful, but I found his ornamented clay fish a bit disturbing. The fish, with one large eye has its mouth open to either breath or smile (hovering in between the two), but it’s full of fierce Pirana like large sharp teeth, bared. And whenever I re-see it, I smile again, but also see at the same time its mouth full of large murderously sharp teeth such as I have never seen in a fish.
Then I realised that Lankan mati wada must be replete with folk humour, violence and imagination, which is robust and varied in the folk ritual performance modes and masks I am familiar with. The writers understand the importance of Dankotuwa for the tile industry which gets its clay from that region when they situate Sarath in that milieu, to show how he innovates on this traditional craft by experimenting with the more durable red tile clay to make his earthenware pieces.
The late Charith Pelpola is the critic who, I think, writes most profoundly of Sarath’s red earthenware pots and of their painterly qualities, seeing in one pot the colours of nature of pealing bark, for example. He describes how colour is created through experimental firing techniques, which makes Sarath a modern artist, drawing from tradition, but also departing from it decisively, without severing that ‘nourishing umbilical cord’, as AJ might say. Charith was a wildlife photographer who preferred to spend his time in the forest and a poet, gone much too soon. His prose is delicate, nuanced. He also photographed some of these pots for the book on Sarath, Path of Visual Arts (2005), which images are a consolation in the absence of the originals.
I won’t provide more examples of the excellent critical work preserved in this volume, but hope that I have been able to arouse some curiosity in the reader to seek it out, so that new histories (in the plural), of the 90s might be written without self-interest as the main driver. And also, simply to learn the craft of interviewing and writing, so as to engage the mind of the reader with respect, imaginatively.
We academics can learn heaps from good journalists because they are very disciplined in their awareness of time (in minutes and seconds) and space (column inches)! and appear to be more careful with words than we verbose academics, enamoured of ‘Theory’, creating bubbles. Let’s burst them, they are just soap! Don’t get me wrong. Some continental schools of thought are essential for my teaching and researching film and art and many of our students at Sydney University’s Art History and Film Dept. have a voracious appetite for ideas and theories which they seek out. I saw this very thing happening during the Aragalaya thanks to the internet. That excitement requires dedicated, systematic work over years to be of use.
But it’s certainly possible to introduce Benjamin (or anyone), briefly (also mentioning that he was a German Jew writing in the context of the rise of the Nazi party), if a little home work is done first. And to begin with, when addressing people in the public sphere with a mixed audience, at the very least, it’s essential to say, for example, who ‘Walter Benjamin’ was in the context of the ‘Frankfurt school of Critical Theory’ of the mid-20th Century. At the very least, one must introduce and situate a thinker respectfully, like we say in Sinhala when we are introduced to a stranger: ‘me kaude? (Who is this?) Kage kaude? (Whose who is s/he or who is s/he connected with?) Kinde manda?’ (So, what’s s/he on about?), as first steps in intellectual public speech.
If, for example, it was noted that Benjamin was a close friend of Brecht’s and that he wrote a series of essays (Understanding Brecht), defending and explaining his novel idea of ‘Epic Theatre’ (when it was subject to criticism by the progressive German left), it would certainly have helped, for the obvious reason that Brecht is a beloved playwright in Lanka. A critic must create the conditions for open receptivity of ideas. And it is crucial when introducing any concept or idea, to do so with a degree of precision and explain why it’s useful, relevant in that particular context to understand something.
The Bourgeoise Public Sphere of the 18th Century
Before I end, let me say a few words about the derivation of the concept of ‘the public sphere’ in my title. It’s a political idea as theorised by the thinkers of the Frankfurt School of Social Research, Benjamin, Adorno and others, including Habermas who is still alive. Here’s a potted account. The public sphere is the product of the 18th Century European Enlightenment. ‘Bourgeoise’ derived from ‘Bourg’ means the city in French.
So, it’s in the urban centres of European cities that an educated professional and business middle class first emerged, well before the French Revolution separated the public sphere from the control of the Church and the State. With the creation of the press and a journal culture and leisure, conversation on art and politics flourished in coffee houses where new democratic values were discussed. But the separation of the home from the public sphere meant that most bourgeoise women were stuck at home with children, in a private domestic sphere, with domestic ‘servants’ for help. So, the public sphere was largely male even in the 19th century, with most women having very limited access to professional education until the mid-1890s.
The ‘Third Estate’ is the term for this rising middle-class in the French parliament before the revolution, and the ‘Fourth Estate’ became the free press, to express diverse opinions and ideas and news. With industrialisation and modernisation this exclusive class structure changed with mass education, literacy and mass culture. Crucially, the democratic public sphere then included the urban working classes working classes as also consumers, especially of film.
An Australian Feminist Public Sphere: 70s and 80s
I have an impression that, while there are many women speaking publicly in Sinhala on the arts in Lanka, the theoretical discourses are still wielded by a few men (I stand happily corrected here too), as I am a distant observer-participant. This was exactly the case in Australia in the 70s when we began to read what then was called ‘French Theory,’ in translation. It was the case that a few men dominated art forums and spun theory with ease, using obscurantist language, often culled freely from, for example, Jacque Derrida’s philosophy, among others.
His use of language was especially easy to parrot like a manthra. It was intimidating when this happened in Australia, though we were all studying this stuff at the University, in the late 70s and 80s. The men wrote for the art press in an obfuscating theoretical jargon. Their lack of deep contextual understanding, covered up by the jargon, didn’t stop them from speaking in public with a certain masculine bravado. Some were seduced. They created followers. Male narcissism knew no limits.
But our independent public sphere of cinema in Australia changed once some female scholars educated in France returned (having actually studied with some of the major philosophers such as Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan and others), and translated their stuff while worked in both the main stream media as journalists, film reviewers and in the University as casual lecturers, formulating new courses to study this material systematically. They began to write, using the ‘difficult French Theory’, even in the popular press, in a lively prose which made it both accessible and engaging.
They taught us by giving us tools to analyse the rhetoric of ‘male theory-speak’ to see through its tactics, which were undemocratic because mystifying. In contrast, these women used language not as a weapon of seduction and control, but as a means to make ideas accessible. We never looked back, and since then, female intellectuals in Australia, due to many other reasons as well, have become confident and publicly articulate in significant numbers.
I recount this Australian story here as a little parable for the feminist writers and speakers working in the vernacular public sphere of visual culture in Lanka. As a feminist elder I say, do not feed male narcissism of intellectuals (a bottomless well), and allow them to dumb yourself down in the process. Enjoy teaching yourself and others and speaking in public with flare and intelligence and in this way a democratic public sphere of visual culture will be nourished.
Don’t feel shy if you slip up every now and then make a fool of yourself, just get up and brush yourself like Chaplin, and do it again and again if you must, so you get practiced. I’ve been there many times. Ouch! Each time, I had the feeling I got a bit stronger. But we know we can’t do this alone, we need likeminded women and men too.
A respected Lankan academic retiring back home after a career overseas (having reinvented himself as an ‘Asian Film Specialist’ which is how I met him) gave a lecture on Derrida once, which may have been an early example of this trend of fetishizing Theory. He spun bits and pieces of ‘Derridean theory’ which didn’t make any sense to me. There were Sinhala specialist words I didn’t understand but I understood the main thrust.
This specialist (true to a dark Sri Lankan academic trait) tried to obstruct the publication of a book of mine as one of the three readers of my manuscript on The Epic Cinema of Kumar Shahani (Indiana University Press, 2015, 300 pages). His reader’s report stated that I must ‘revise and resubmit’ the text, with further research as outlined by him! Perhaps he didn’t understand my work.
But I did correct the spelling of the Pali word (‘Dhamma Dweepa’) as pointed out by him. The other two readers, one an Indian media scholar from the US and the other an English scholar of Hindi Cinema said that the manuscript was ready to go to press! I had the pleasure of formally rebutting my compatriot’s intellectually feeble report (my democratic right), which the press accepted.
I recall this nasty, intellectually indefensible act today, just a few days after Kumar Shahani (my guru and one of the great visionary film directors of India), passed away at the age of 83. His very first words to me, when I called him to say my book was out, were: ‘Is there something of yourself in it?’ I feel that my book made him happy, the only one so far on his profound and delicate oeuvre of seven films.
We didn’t talk about it. There was no need to. He took great care of me over the decade and more of researching this book, learning about India a little from him. He kept in touch with me, I sought his advice while writing my piece for the Island on Sarath’s book on Karaikkal Ammaiyar of Polonnaruwa, but my last email remained unanswered … but he is present as a shadow guiding me in what I write.
Two women critics I heard recently, speaking (in Matale and Melbourne, in Sinhala), on Manuwarna’s Whispering Mountains, were both fluent and highly sophisticated in their ability to intermesh politics, aesthetics, and also able to evoke the memory of existential dread of that era of national sate violence and shame. It was utterly moving. They made me long to see the film, which is what good criticism can do. That’s on my short list for the next life, if there is one!
To come back to Sarath – I will leave you with his response to Chamila Somirathna’s probing enquiry:
“A sculptor is always a painter but a painter cannot always be a sculptor’.
Go figure!
