Casting Bronze – Playing with Fire:

Tissa Ranasinghe and Fine Art Pedagogy

By Dr. Laleen Jayamanne

(First part of this article appeared last Wednesday (13)

Process and Impressions: Sculpting Time

Just as Weeraratne gave us an insight into Tissa’s process of casting bronze, I want to describe an important aspect of Sarath Chandrajeewa’s process in sculpting the heads for his ‘100 Impressions in Bronze’ exhibition in 1994, because I think it has an educational value which I believe might be useful now. In an email exchange, when I asked Chandrajeewa about how he modelled the eyes in Geoffrey Bawa’s portrait sculpture, he responded with an explanation of his process of preparation. He said he would sit and talk to the subject for about 10 to 15 minutes before the actual sculpting begins. He said that what he observed-sensed in this process was sufficient for him to sculpt the head, which didn’t require constant empirical verification by looking at the model. When one observes the YouTube videos of him sculpting, we see that he doesn’t frequently look at the subject. I asked him why, in the case of Bawa’s head, his eyeballs were looking in different directions and were asymmetrical, one larger than the other. But that he was not squinting, he looked normal, more or less. I added that I brought the eyes up close through the zoom-in function on my computer, not having seen the original, because even at the normal distance there seemed to be an anomaly in the eyes. He then said that when he first met Geoffrey he had requested him to remove his spectacles so as to observe his eyes. He said he noticed that Bawa’s eyes constantly moved, that they were not ‘targeted’ at anything. He also saw that his body was not stable because he needed a walking stick to steady himself.

The parable of non-targeted perception has a rich history in Indian mythology. In the Mahabharata when Yudhishtira, the great archer, is asked why he hesitates to display his skill in a contest by striking the target, he replies that he sees everything in focus! When asked about modelling Bawa’s eyes in this strange way, he says it’s connected to a sense of an impression he gets and the grooves he makes and how light plays on them as well, something he can’t control exactly.

The speed at which Sarath sculpts has been described famously by Arthur C. Clarke in a rather unimaginative way, when he described him as a ‘human photocopying machine’. For Clarke, what seems to matter is the speed at which the resemblance between the original and the copy is produced. It is of course intended as a compliment but there is nothing mechanical in the process. The phenomenon of astonishing speed, of anywhere between one to at most four hours, may be approached by asking why he spent time talking to his subject and what sensory material it provided him with. Not that we’ll ever know, but asking the question gives one a chance to feel something about a process which is imperceptible to our eyes, but which one may understand as the speed of thought. Speed of thought may be understood as an ability to synthesise quick-silver sensations before conceptual thought can rationalise and digest them. The neural pathways between touch, perception, and voice exchange sensory inputs at an immeasurable speed under certain circumstances, we learn from neuroscience. While Chandrajeewa has allowed the filming of his work of sculpting, he is clearly ‘elsewhere’ in a circuit of energy that we can see so palpably as the absolute focus of self-forgetfulness, as in meditation. There is no drama there, as in a contest, nor a soliciting of attention. He says when asked, that after the work is completed, his feeling of mental and physical exhaustion is such that he needs to be quiet, silent and this, not because he is wrestling with molten metal and fire but perhaps because he is trying to imprint on clay an elusive sensation transmitted by the person almost subliminally, that hovers just below the threshold of the sculptor’s conscious awareness, before his own rational processes digest it well. The replication of an original in a copy is only a means to capture a feeling or a quality, which is elusive, subtle, delicate and therefore may resist linguistic capture. The struggle here appears to be within the human brain of the sculptor himself and the relays among its cortical and subcortical systems activated by the fingers, which are rich in nerve endings. V. S. Ramachandran, the South Indian trained neuroscientist, working at the Salk Institute, has developed these ideas in terms of synaesthesia, where all of the senses work in concert, in complex relays, especially in the case of artists and musicians. As one of Sarath’s students said, bronze casting cannot be sustained for long, if you do it yourself, because it takes its toll on the body and mind.

The mind’s attempt to control molten metal and fire must require great reserves of mental energy.

Art as Therapy

We know that there are deep traditions of Sri Lankan art and ritual which create altered states of consciousness, such as traditional dance forms performed to the varied rhythms of drumming. This we can feel immediately in our body when we hear Lankan drumming even if we are not dancers. Chandrajeewa’s book, Emaciated female playing the cymbals: A study of an ancient Hindu bronze figurine in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka, provides an account of the sculpture of Karaikkal Ammaiyar (a Shiva Bhakt or devotee). While she plays the cymbals and sings, it is clear that she is in a state of ecstasy (outside the self or ego, in Greek). While her cult does not exist any longer in Sri Lanka, in South India she is worshipped as a mother goddess. Old Tamil women who dance at Kataragama with a self-forgetful abandon are in this zone. In the long 20th Century of industrialised mass-violence, art too has played a modest therapeutic function and continues to do so. Gananath Obeyesekere’s ethnographic work on spirit possession and cure in Sri Lanka also provides useful examples of the therapeutic value of ritual. These gendered examples of altered states of consciousness I have mentioned are at one end of a complex continuum with therapeutic value, which also includes quiet, meditative states. I think Chandrajeewa’s process of working on the Bronze heads belongs to this register of quiet meditative awareness.

I see the whole ‘100 Impressions in Bronze’ project as a therapeutic process and an unusual intervention, a contemporary ritual (without the superstitions), invoking a critical time between 1987- 89, of extreme political violence, terror, in the country. The bronze heads respond to the horror of the decapitated body of persons, with a gesture of profound care and attentiveness to each person who lent their heads to be sculpted, irrespective of social rank. This specific context of political violence and a response to it, must be stressed in any discussion of this work, as even the most traditional art history would insist. This process of sculpting is quite different from an idea of reason manifested in explicitly political art of the time and its own declarative discourse of legitimation, which were important in that context. Here, Chandrajeewa’s deep attentiveness to each person’s singularity and uniqueness was central. The impression of Bawa’s constantly moving eyes as sculpted by Sarath, appear to be moving in different directions at the same time, not obedient to single-point perspectival vision. His vision was not ‘targeted’, is how Chandrajeewa put it. Bawa could see (before others could), the granite rock face, the concrete, steel and glass structure and the deep forest that would, according to the rhythms of nature, cover over it all. A contemporary hotel sprouting grass, with creepers where birds nest and monkeys hang out, may create myriad connections in our minds. And intuitively, Chandrajeewa has mounted Bawa’s metal head on a granite plinth.

If a fine grained ethnography of the artist’s models were done at the time, (alas! too late now by decades), then we might have heard at two extremes of Lanka’s multiple and wounding social divides, what the old Tissahamy from a Veddha tribe or perhaps his son Vanniye Aththo, felt, about the process of coming to Colompura and sitting down to entrust his visage to the sculptor. Bawa with his ever-moving eyes, looking in an untargeted manner, would certainly have been able to sense and feel something in the whole process and express it more imaginatively than Arthur C Clark who exclaimed, as the good sci-fi writer he was, that his likeness was a clone. Perhaps more intuitively like Anoja Weerasingha’s response that her heart was impressed on her face, but of course differently, because Bawa was such a raconteur, a wonderful story-teller, who loved to make friends laugh (children included), with his idiosyncratic ability to see social and other anomalies.

Chandrajeewa, like Weeraratne before him, has chronicled an explosion of creativity in Sri Lanka in the 1990s in the midst of the civil war, suggesting that there was a lot more happening, alongside the significant ‘90’s Trend’ in art which has received the most attention.

Political Art in Bronze: April 1971

According to Chandrajeewa (the chronicler of fine art education at the then Government College of Art which is now part of the University of Visual and Performing Arts), Tissa Ranasingha was deeply disappointed by the rejection of his new plans and proposals for the development of fine art education, by the student union of the college.

According to Chandrajeewa the post of principal was filled by political appointment thereafter causing irreparable damage to the entire visual art education. He is quite emphatic about Tissa’s important role not only as an educator but also as the Lankan artist who pioneered a response to political violence and traumatic events, through his art.

“Tissa was the first modern Sri Lankan artist who denounced terror, violence, and tragedy through the medium of visual art. At the exhibition held in 1971, a bronze sculpture in the form of an electric bulb bomb, held by a hand where the flesh had been dissolved, was considered a master symbol of the entire insurgency. It referred to the primitive bombs made of empty tins and bulbs used by the insurgents. In other exhibitions, the Pettah bomb blast, the Aranthalawa massacre of Buddhist monks, or the Tsunami disaster, were addressed and critiqued by his three-dimensional media. In many ways Tissa Ranasingha thus anticipated concepts of art-making which emerged in the 1990s, even though this history has not been acknowledged by contemporary writers on the so-called ‘90’s Trend’”. (“Modern Art in Sri Lanka and its Socio-political Environment” (33), in Artful Resistance: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka, edited by Sylvia S. Kasprycki and Doris I Stambru, 2010, ZKF Publishes).

If important work such as these in Bronze were readily available in a permanent collection, exhibited suitably at a national museum or art gallery, historical amnesia about Sri Lanka’s recent, contemporary art history could have been averted. Perhaps it’s not too late even now. I have not followed the historiography on the 1971 insurgency and the political responses to it over the years after I left the country that year for further study in the US. But in enacting retrospective legislation to swiftly kill the insurgents and crush the rebellion of a generation of educated Sinhala Buddhist rural youth, who felt dispossessed without a future, the state violated democratic principles. I remember a cross-section of Lankan intellectuals protested this extra-legal action with a petition and compiled an index of writing on the insurgency and analysed its causes in scholarly articles soon after the insurrection. I was staying on the Peradeniya campus on that fateful morning when a stash of bombs, hidden in the ceiling of one of the men’s halls of residence, went off accidentally, triggering an early warning leading to a declaration of a state of emergency and curfew enforced almost immediately. Soon afterwards dead bodies of young insurgents began to float down rivers. It was a watershed event for Sri Lanka’s democracy. Tissa Ranasinghe’s bronze-light-bulb-bomb-burnt-hand ‘assemblage’ appears to call out, light up and beam a ray of light to this present moment. If only we would turn around and notice in the gathering dark (3628).

(Concluded)