Bawa Art Industry: Lunuganga, and Chandrajeewa Atelier: Wennappuwa

By Dr. Laleen Jayamanne

Art history annedotally

The pioneering Viennese Art Historian Alois Riegl wrote a book that was not very popular among traditional Anglo-American art historians but some of us film theorists poured over it, the prose a bit dry in translation, but with some powerful ideas. The book is The Late Roman Art Industry, an examination of the industrialisation of production in late antiquity (during the last stages of the Roman Empire), of previously handmade craft-work. Because film is an industrial artifact, this book provided some lateral ideas to us to think of the deep history of industrialisation of goods as commodities, including film and idea of legal contracts. But more urgently, it helped us to begin to understand the industrialisation of thinking in the Neo-Liberal globalised University. In Australia, we were ordered to produce more and more, faster and faster. No one spoke about quality. Hardly anyone had time to read each other’s work anymore and most tragically, students just speed-read bits and pieces without reading arguments carefully and thoughtfully. The globalised art industry of Biennales and Triennials, and mushrooming film festivals, are also products of this same dynamic of Neo-liberal capitalism where the market rules, after the dissolution of the Soviet Republics in 1991.

Within this savage market economy, talented artists become hyper competitive and are in danger of developing a repetitive formula. And curators may unwittingly encourage narcissistic mirror games, conforming to their perception of what matters. This creates weak art over time, deskilling artists and also cliques who operate through exclusionary tactics, where artists who do not fit in are shut out of the art and film history narratives and collections. In the fractious small art world of Sri Lanka this situation needs to be discussed openly, calmly and with rational rigour. This is my aim here as a Lankan who lives in Australia but who is engaged to some extent with the contemporary Lankan film culture, as a scholar of the Lankan cinema for over 50 years.

Riegl, was a founding figure of the discipline of art history, working in Vienna at the peak of its intellectual, artistic and political power in Europe just before the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire with World War One. He was also the curator of Islamic Art at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Vienna and the famous exhibition of Islamic fabric and carpets he curated just before his untimely death in 1905, was also visited by Henri Matisse. So an ancient Islamic civilizational crafted material and European high Modernism came into a generative contact in an imperial Art Museum. (Art history was invented by Winkleman at the Vatican museum, after he converted to Roman Catholicism. He studied Greek art there without ever going to Greece!). Riegel also lectured at the University of Vienna. There, Klimt’s famous allegorical murals caused a controversy and rejected, therefore an art historian defended them by giving a lecture titled, ‘What is Ugly?’, considering it seriously as an aesthetic category of Viennese modernism and of avant-garde art. And his far ranging books, on the Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, and on ornament in particular, still provide vital ideas on ornament as a mode of thinking, a power of connectivity, rather than just prettified, picturesque, vegetal motifs. He starts with Egypt and arabesques his way through epochs of great cross-cultural exchange in trade and ideas and also wars.

Lankan Scholar/Artists

I am writing about this stuff now hoping that Lankan art historians and curators might just be tempted to consider seriously the work of two Lankan artists working in different art forms but both of whom are also scholars in their own right and are University Professors. Doing so would, I expect, considerably strengthen the intellectual discourses on art, connecting them to wider political and cultural ideas across social class, caste, ethnicity, languages and genre boundaries in Sri Lankan cultural production.

According to my brief non-specialist research, (being a film scholar and critic), Sarath Chandrajeewa is considered, by some, to be Sri Lanka’s preeminent contemporary sculptor working in Bronze and Terra Cotta (rathu mati), for well over 30 years. He was the star pupil of Tissa Ranasingha, with whom he studied bronze casting on a government scholarship, at the Royal College of Art, London. Ranasingha is considered the pioneering Lankan sculptor (monumental, portrait, and other), of the modern era after independence. Chandrajeewa also paints, and has produced large clay figurative relief murals of ‘the people’, and abstract tiled murals in a pedestrian tunnel, and has had a scholarly publishing project of significance for Lankan art history, and cultural theory more broadly, in my non-specialist opinion. But, I have been schooled by working in a Department of Art History and Film at the University of Sydney for a few decades, because ours was an interdisciplinary department. Chandrajeewa also founded with his patron, Harold Peiris, the Contemporary Art and Crafts Association of Sri Lanka (CACA) in 1990, to organise exhibitions and it still functions as a research institution. Like Riegl, he has published work off the beaten track of the art history protocol of specialising on one period, digging the same strata in delicious detail and not treading on jealously guarded intellectual ‘private’ territory. This approach of art historians, I think made rigid by the American academy, was a source of amazement to us film scholars because our discipline was organised differently, a bit unruly, with a much shorter history than art has and was inter-disciplinary in its very formation as film is a popular technological commodity, made for entertainment and making profit, first and foremost, with aspirations to become Art.

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Professor Sumathy Sivamohan is the only independent woman filmmaker who has produced a significant body of films, exploring the muti-ethnic polity of Sri Lanka from the point of view of minority communities. While her body of work is still growing, she has a clear project of examining Lankan Nationalisms from the point of view of minority communities. Her Sons and Fathers is in Sinhala exploring the multi-ethnic formation of the Lankan film industry from its very inception. The civil war and its aftermath is the background to her research. As a professor of English, she is also a literary theorist who also teaches film and producers scholarly work. I am hoping that the few observations I make here may arouse a curiosity at the very least, to create opportunities to engage with her work seriously. Interdisciplinary dialogue has been essential for a long while now in any serious progressive public sphere of culture and without deep scholarship, what you often get is mere ‘art-speak’ one hears on Youtube, sometimes lively and generous and fun but often lacking the intellectual bite of complex ideas that one can take up and wrestle with and further explore by reading widely and debating, discussing and then use to further our understanding by writing. Sivamohan’s and Chandrajeewa’s work also happily converged in the book of poetry called Frames edited by the latter, forthcoming in late 2022, if there is no paper shortage! The name derives from the large stacks of door and window frames which have lost their functional utility after bomb blasts in Jaffna during the civil war.

The images of these blasted buildings, and their intact solid door and window frames share a space with the poetry and movingly enframe them. The book is an attempt to speak to that void across the linguistic barriers. Among the poems there is one by Sivamohan and also by her sister Dr. Rajani Thiranagama, her sister, who taught Anatomy at the Jaffna University and was assassinated by a LTTE gunman as she was riding home after teaching, within ear-shot of her home. Her photo is the only human face in the book. And I believe Sarath and Sumathy have not met each other as yet, except for a chance brief encounter at a meeting of artists, with the then President Maithripala Sirisena. Sumathy was the only artist there who spoke in Tamil, with a translator. And what better place to launch Frames than at MMCA that uses all three languages with a very long term record of engagement with promoting art making in the time of the civil war, especially in Jaffna and unusually have poetry readings there, too.

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I gather the field of Sinhala film culture is highly evolved, robust, with heated debates, cult groups, brilliant theorists, a quarterly film journal, Chitrapata Magazine and numerous blogs and newspapers and so on. In the more polite middle class art world the surface is smooth and inviting, tri-lingual now in important institutions, though there is an undercurrent of violence and hostility camouflaged in specific instants, I am discovering, as I do my research. These appear to be of a professional nature. I am all too familiar with this mode of behavior, having taught in several Australian Universities for over 30 odd years and having fought tooth and nail, successfully, an effort to sack me on false charges about my teaching or lack thereof, in a provincial University. Professional rivalries and cruelty are quite well developed in Universities and the tactics and strategy familiar but what’s unique to Sri Lanka is the direct connections academics and some artists have to political power that appear limitless. It is shocking to hear an academic/artist boast of his direct access to people in power and even to the president of the country to deal with one’s conflicts.

Both Tissa Ranasingha and Sarath Chandrajeewa were also academics, the latter a VC of the University of Visual and Performing Art, as well, who tried to fundamentally transform a moribund feudal fine arts curriculum and ethos into a modern one that would educate the students according the best standards of fine arts education practice in the world and to become informed, responsible global citizens. They were both forced to resign due to actions authorised at highest levels of government. This story is public knowledge and I learnt of it only recently from information mostly available on the internet and some passing comments in an art book published in Australia edited by the Human Rights curator and architect of the Asia Pacific Triennale, of the Queensland Art Gallery, Caroline Turner.

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The Geoffrey Bawa Lunuganga Trust, established after the celebrated architect’s death, has become a visionary educational institution, under the Lunuganga Trust. And the new Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, directed by Senior curator Sharmini Pereira, aims to make it an inclusive centre of art education in this country and build its collection accordingly. And it is to these institutions that I address a call for an experimental move, of opening an exchange with these two senior scholar/artists. Might the launch of Frames at one of these institutions be the occasion to start this belated encounter? (The concluding part of this article will appear in the Midweek Review of 06 April)