Between abstraction and empathy in Sarath Chandrajeewa’s visual paraphrases

by Dr. Santhushya Fernando,
Dr. Laleen Jayamanne and
Prof Sumathy Sivamohan

“Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet.” Paul Cezanne

Dominic Sansoni’s recent black & white photograph of Sarath Chandrajeewa’s head (taken among his One Hundred Impressions in Bonze Gallery at his Atelier in Wennappuwa), appears to be cast in metal. Dominic has done the impossible by sculpting Sarath’s image into a bronze head with the lightest of energy, light itself. It’s this activity of transmutation of energy and metamorphosis (might we call this a process of abstraction?), that we want to talk about together here. We feel unable to easily discuss discursively, ‘abstract’ or ‘non-representational’ or ‘non-objective visual art’, which itself is the reason for wanting to write this so as to learn some. It’s not that we don’t sense and feel something in such an encounter, but rather that we don’t have an adequate conceptual vocabulary to transform aesthetic sensations and feelings into words and thoughts, which when it entails art is a very delicate, subtle process. We want to discuss Sarath’s recent exhibition at Barefoot Art Gallery, titled Visual Paraphrases (November 24 – December 10, 2023), with this in mind. We will approach human powers of sensuous abstraction, especially in art, by lightly touching on an evolutionary palaeo-anthropological perspective and glancing at prehistory with its archaeological finds such as microliths, tools, cave paintings, pottery and later bronze artefacts.

Pre-History: Palaeo-Anthropology

Andre Leroi-Gourhan the French Palaeontologist, in his highly specialised and yet accessible, celebrated book, Gesture and Speech, tracks the slow evolutionary drama of the interrelationship between the hand and the brain through the morphology of Homo Sapiens determined by bilateral-symmetry (of the right and left sides of the body). The hands freed from locomotion up on trees swung as humans walked upright barefoot. The freed hand led to the creation of tools (technology) and the larger more differentiated brain. According to this theory the brain didn’t lead evolution, the upright posture and the two feet in movement did, and as a result the prehensile hands freed of locomotion and the brain atop the vertical spine worked together. The Latin root for the word ‘Man’ is derive from ‘Manus’ which means ‘hand’ from which ‘Manual’ and several other species defining words are formed. The Sinhala Manushya and Tamil, Manithan, also derive from ‘Man’ belonging to the same Indo-European language group.

Leroi-Gourhan theorises that tool making and use were done in a sequence of actions which he links to speech. This process (at its most complex), created syntactical sequences of meaningful sounds; speech. The animal face with its snout and mouth were freed from the feeding function of foraging, relegated now to the hand, so that the human jaw, teeth, lips, tongue and mouth adjusted/evolved (with a supple larynx) to make articulated sounds, which in sequence became meaningful; language. Leroi-Gouhran says rather enigmatically that, ‘to speak is to speak softly’. We eat and speak from the same orifice. This truism is encoded in the saying that ‘words are food for thought’. Sometimes, when ashamed, we have to even ‘eat our words’, in English at least!

Leroi-Gourhan again on the long history of human cultural development with technology: “Whether the agrarian economy came in gradually, and whatever forms the transition may have taken in peripheral regions, the process that began in the Near East during the Mesolithic era towards 8,000, had by 5,000 BC completely transformed the structure of societies from Mesopotamia to Turkey, Greece, and Egypt. Even before the appearance of pottery between 6000 and 5000 B.C, the foundations for the new economy had been laid by the association of wheat and barley with sheep, goats, and pigs, and the first permanent villages had come into existence. Cultural variations were already considerable”.

The Artisan-Craftsmen of Lanka

FALLEN MONUMENT

Sarath Chandrajeewa’s creative praxis broadly encompasses the three most ancient expressive plastic forms, Painting, Pottery and Bronze Sculpture. These three craft skills entailing specific, precise, sequential activities or ‘Gestures’ (in Leroi-Gourhans’ terminology), emerged slowly with their respective technologies and developed slowly into different art forms from paleolithic era (Stone Age) to ancient Bronze age civilizations. Therefore, to begin to understand the rigorous technical and conceptual training required and the manual processes involved in these crafts, over centuries, one is drawn to read up a little on archaeology, pre-history of art globally (Cave Art) and paleo-anthropology (fossil records). Doing so one glimpses deep evolutionary time before the separation of ‘The Arts’ from artisanal craft activity in the very recent early Modern era of the European Renaissance and then in industrial modernity. Sarath (whatever else he might be as a scholar, teacher, university administrator), appears to be in an ancient lineage of artisans, belonging to a ‘genus’ or specialised social group, a specific category of gifted, skilled, anonymous craftsmen that Lanka had had in plenty, once upon a time, but no longer. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy famously paid tribute to these anonymous craftsmen of Lanka in his visionary, hand-crafted book, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (Campden: Gloucestershire, 1908). Here, it’s worth remembering that it took nearly sixty years for this unique book to be translated into Sinhala.

Within the history of Sri Lankan art Sarath Chandrajeewa is an anomaly. Traditionally, a Lankan potter would not have been able to cast in bronze, not because he had a ‘pottery head’, but because of belonging to a low caste in Sinhala-Buddhist society, though he might indeed have drawn on a pot or two, if he had time after his gruelling labour. Even now, after nearly a century of free education in the Fine Arts there are only a few bronze sculptors in the country. Ironically, Sarath had to go to Britain to study bonze casting from Tisse Ranasinghe at the Royal College of Art in London. Sculpture made by welding light metal like tin, which, for instance, Laki Senanayaka did so innovatively, is another skill altogether. A recent film honours his many exuberant talents.

Liquid Metal & Cinematography

We wonder if an imaginative soul, with a taste for interdisciplinary research and an understanding of film aesthetics might make a film on Sarath’s craft processes, skills and thought processes (at his unique Atelier in Wennappuwa, which is a foundry cum Gallery and school and living space, all in one), before it’s too late. Imagine how thrilling it would be to experience the fiery foundry where molten metal buckets are carried with iron prongs by Sarath and his several able-bodied young assistants wearing protective masks. The metal flowing like lava into moulds, matter (bronze), turning into spirit!

Plasticity of Clay & the Brain

Also, there are the terra cotta objects with the tactile clay to play with. Here, Mani Kauls’ film Mati Manas (Mind of Clay, India, 1985), may be drawn on, noting the value conferred by this modernist filmmaker on the craft of the anonymous, humble potters of perennial India. Note that he uses the word manas, mind, to denote the ‘plasticity of the brain’ itself, required for the crafting of clay objects. Then, take a deep breath, and compare it with the pathetic, derogatory term, Pottery-Head Dankotuwa coined by a well know academic/artists to put down Sarath’s combination of craft skill with deep historical scholarships.

Childhood Play Impulse

How Sarath instructs children as young as 5 or 6 to paint would itself be instructive for teachers of art to observe. It was Walter Benjamin who developed the ‘Proletariat Theatre Project for Children’ (with Azka Larkis), to learn how children played! He believed that bourgeoise education crushed children’s ‘Mimetic Faculty’, their innate capacity to create imaginative worlds through playing.

Hand Crafted Books

The pedagogic value of such a film for posterity would be quite considerable we think, as teachers ourselves. Besides, Sarath is also an educator who has a well thought out philosophy of education based on teaching, research and curriculum development for the Fine Arts, worth recording, at a time when the value of the Humanities is under siege in Lanka. In addition to designing and producing hand-crafted books of art scholarship at the imprint “Sri Lankan Arts and Crafts Association’, he has also assiduously and dispassionately chronicled both the violent and visionary institutional history of the University of Visual and Performing Arts where he was at first a student in the 70s and then a teacher, Professorial Dean and a Vice Chancellor until he was sacked from the last position by a ‘yaha palana’ presidential decree, ‘without cause’. These chronicles would be primary documents, should a historian of Lankan art become interested in formulating the baleful impact of Sinhala-Buddhist ideology on fine arts education policy, teaching and research.

We three academics, coming from three different intellectual disciplines (Medicine, English Literature, Theatre and Film Studies) worked along-side each other here, so as to understand this mysterious process of a ‘will to abstraction’ or non-objective art, evident in Sarath’s work. None of us are art historians but are learning on the run its diverse histories and theories relevant to our topic. Of the three of us, Santhushya and Sumathy have seen the exhibition, while Laleen has seen it telescopically, only on her computer and in the paper Catalogue to the exhibition, from Sydney. So, she believes that the other two friends and colleagues are her microscopic eyes. All of us know Sarath’s work (artistic and scholarly) to some degree, and have worked with him but Santhushya has known him intimately since childhood as well. Sumathy contributed a poem and a photograph of and a poem by her sister Rajani to the Jaffna Doors and Windows book, a collective multi-ethnic project conceived and produced by Sarath. Laleen however, though she has written on Sarath’s work, has never met him nor spoken with him or seen his work with her own eyes. But before the angel of death calls, she hopes to visit the Sri Lankan High Commission in Canberra to see his large figurative clay mural of folk traditions, celebrating our multi-ethnic Island home. It is a contribution to Australian culture too which has nourished several distinguished Lankan artists (Dharmasena and Milinda Pathiraja), and scholars (Michael Roberts, Neville Weerarathne, Anoma Pieris), and provided some with a hospitable home in an expansive multi-cultural ethos.

Art in the Brain; A Medical Perspective

Dr. Santhushya Fernando, who directs the innovative ‘Medical Humanities’ programme at the Colombo Medical College, says that the latest research in Neuro Science demonstrates how art activates complex cognitive processes by recruiting diverse brain regions. Due to the sensory dynamism of these processes, there is a great deal of ‘redundancy’ or excess in the operations of the Sensory-Motor system when we perceive art, she says. Here, excess of sensations (rather than purely functional efficiency), stimulates cognitive and affective processes in unpredictable ways. As such, that form of immediate, non-rational (not irrational), illumination we call ‘intuition’ is activated. Santhushya adds that, “recent neuroscience and behavioural studies done in relation to abstract art stimulate us to question why abstract art holds its appeal to the human mind. The research suggests that ‘Abstract Art’ appears to free our brain from the dominance of reality”. In so doing it derails our sensory-motor perceptual habits, enabling subtle sensations, of light and colour, say, “to flow within the brain’s inner processes”. These uncensored intuitive processes in turn “create new emotional and cognitive associations”. Artists, scientists and indeed mystics, have spoken eloquently of such profound intuitive experiences over centuries. Undoubtedly, Leroi-Gouhran is one such intuitive scientist.

Sarath, while sculpting his One Hundred Impressions in Bronze (1992), appears to have been immersed in this precarious, volatile zone of intuitive awareness. Santhushya has had the privilege recently of being sculpted and cast in Bronze by Sarath and has (unusually), written insightfully about her own experience of the process, what she felt. Her bronze head was placed in an adjacent space, separate from the Visual Paraphrases exhibition itself, which caught Sumathy’s eye and she wrote to Laleen about the quality or ‘impression’ captured there of Santhushya’s gaze. For myself, [SUMATHY] I looked at the eyes very carefully, for I had already been alerted to the way Sarath works on sculpting, starting with the eyes, or observing the eyes very carefully. When I heard this I was struck by how prescient this was; how truly distinctive. Not knowing anything about sculpting, I wondered whether this is how other sculptors worked. The eyes tell us not so much about the person herself as about where our gaze is directed. I have never met Santhusya in person, but gazing upon the sculpted figure, I thought of the bond between Sarath and the author of that person; two authors here. Two writers and two creators. Puzzling out and thinking about this bond between sculptor and subject intrigued me greatly. I had also seen Ivor Jennings’s statue that Sarath had made for the University of Peradeniya. What are his eyes like? But more importantly what does he gaze at? Similarly, Sarath’s One Hundred Impressions in Bronze has had this powerful centrifugal (not centripetal) force on those who have encountered this work (without prejudice), but with an open mind. His work is not narcissistically centred on himself and his subjectivity (whether radical or soulful), but rather, it radiates outward with an effulgence, connecting strangers in faraway places too. This is so true, Laleen. I wonder, by working in pottery and metal, common material, commercial material, and material of the everyday, if one becomes first an artisan and second an artist in the best senses of the terms.

(To be continued)