Art mart

Dear Art Snob,

Before you strut into the echo chamber of Zahoor ul Akhlaq Gallery at the NCA, hold your horses and listen up:

1)   Art is not entertainment. Don’t expect it to dance like a naagin to win you over.

2)  Be grateful! You’re in an institution that has been celebrating pluralism and eccentricity for decades in a country where men settle scores by shooting children in classrooms after burning their teachers in front of them.

3)  Don’t roll your eyes when you read the artists’ statements. I know they’re crawling with “juxtapositions” and insist on “multiple layers and meanings” when there may not be much of either. There are worse things; recall that skeptical Punjabi uncle who told a young artist at a dinner party in Lahore: “Beta aap saari zindagi bus coloring karte raho gey?” (‘Will you spend your whole life coloring, my dear child?’)

4)  The atmosphere may be tribal and you may feel like an outsider. The artists are head-scarfed, or leather-jacketed, or both, and appear to wear their political persuasions on their sleeves. Some are threateningly brandishing cigarettes that were stuck behind their ears for safekeeping. But scratch the surface and you will find you’re talking to nice people who will uphold decency, pay taxes, have children and provide for them. Some of them may even become international art stars!

Now that you’re sufficiently acclimatized, you may proceed into Pakistan’s most sensitive (and storied) cultural laboratory.

Elbow your way through the swarm of cameramen and light guys from Pakistan’s TV channels. A decade ago this media attention would have been a novelty. Now, what with the raging competition of TV channels (and the dearth of real things to transmit to the general public), the NCA thesis show is a glamorous spectacle. To say your show was covered by a TV channel isn’t really a sign of anything other than the times in which you’re living.

Seher Jalil thrives on the reckless savagery of an Expressionist mess

Some of the best work is right here in the first hall. Seher Jalil takes Rashid Rana’s concept of Paradise/Destination (if you’re not cool enough to know what I’m talking about then google ‘Desperately Seeking Paradise Rashid Rana’) and churns out a set of mixed media paintings that equal a slap in the face of anyone who wants to match a painting with their sofa. These are confident works, full of gusto. I’m guessing Jalil doesn’t give a damn about feminism and clearly thrives on the reckless savagery of an Expressionist mess. This is the kind of work that gets a kick out of its own seeming rudeness. Look at her An Ode to the Gates of Paradise (see Image 2). It is a tribute to early Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti’s gilded doors of the Florence Baptistery. Jalil is so cool that she simply sticks clumsy little print-outs of her reference right on the surface of the painting, internalizing and reinvigorating the idea of Painting and Reference, of painting sometimes unbearable links to its own history. The work itself vaguely mimics the panels of Ghiberti’s doors but is united by a violent and obscure gesture in paint. I’m sure it could be something meaningful but young graduates must get used to the idea that once a work exits their studio, their precious little intentions don’t matter. Your work is vulnerable to the scrutiny of people, most of whom don’t care about you. Hard lesson to learn!

Jalil’s fellow graduate Zohreen Murtaza makes her mixed media surface resemble a voracious magpie’s nest (Image 3). The sheer abundance of textural junk is as mesmerizing as a coral reef. How does this stuff stick together? With many layers of adhesive surfaces, apparently. How long does it last? Who cares? It looks great! And there is bravery in producing ephemeral art in a country whose TV-watching populace would beat you up for spending time and money on glued wood shavings and discarded Urdu digests rather than (say) going on Hajj.

Look at the shattered china on this one (Image 4). I feel like I’m in a submersible looking at the now famously tragic remains of the Titanic.

Contemporary art has an added surreal aspect in our part of the world because it has no practical function. (You may argue that all art has had no practical function but that would be a whole other article.) If a work of art could double as a vacuum cleaner it would cease to be art. In a famously poor and intolerant country this annual hustle-bustle of thesis shows is a sophisticated surprise. It means that a few connoisseurs remain interested in the outlandish intelligence of artists, causing artists to remain interested in themselves.

This sounds magical until you find the pricelist. This should give you a more rounded idea of the whole truth. This, right here, is the market: a few wealthy, liberal-seeming drawing rooms in urban centers of our country.

Which is why the most extraordinary achievement for a graduate would be to capture the attention of someone influential from abroad. This fantastical creature would be a First World Museum Shark or a Visiting Curator who will give institutional glamor and hard cash. There are certainly candidates for that kind of thing here. They are seasoned for it too! Talk to one and you may find the artifice of insider terminology, a sales pitch borrowed from the monographs and catalogs of role models like Shahzia Sikander, Rashid Rana, Imran Qureshi, Adeel us Zafar, Faiza Butt, David Alesworth, and Huma Mulji.

Not that it matters, but Abbas Ali’s pictures probably didn’t take a great deal of effort, though they will probably sell like cakes. Sometimes that happens in the art world, right? (See Image 5.)

Right.

This is an excerpt from an Artist Statement down the hall:

My intent is to challenge negative and positive space and highlight its existence as a separate entity that can exist on its own….these invented forms are bold, seemingly simple, but move the viewer to formulate their own narratives..

Hmm. If you insist.

Here are my two cents of wisdom: there is room to be rudely straightforward in a statement as much as in the work itself. Imagine the pleasure of helping a reader to simply understand what you mean rather than impressing them with complications. Go further: imagine describing what you’ve created (whether it’s a double superimposed projection or a sculpture or painting which is actually a projection, pretending to be a sculpture or all three at once) to your cook and your driver. I’m sure you’ll be embarrassed by yourself and at the way the world works on your first try. But keep trying and you might be amazed at your own insight and clarity.

On the other hand, pretentious Artspeak would probably work for the artist rather than against them if they were to be included in significant shows abroad. The art circuit in the First World prefer brown people to reinvent tradition by cleaning it up and garnishing it with Art Talk.

Though the cleverer artist can get around that loophole, that’s just the way it is.

Sadia Farooq fulfills the Spirituality quota for this show with the nobility of beautifully veined marble in Notes to Myself. (See Image 6.) These carved forms look like folded paper planes but are actually mega-taveezes; they are receptacles of secrets linked to Zikr, a traditional Islamic devotional practice turned into a personal meditative diary. These may look like variable permutations but they are actually identical forms, they’re just placed at tricky angles.

For the most cohesive body of work in this show, look at Images 7 and 8. Fareeha Haq scratches Masonite or MDF and the camel-colored results, divided into stylish slick vertical panels, look cool and very expensive. They could fit perfectly in a bachelor pad in a glossy interior design magazine. Strong sheets of MDF are made languid and lithe by soaking in water and made to fold deliciously on themselves like curls of chocolate shaving garnishing a pastry from Masoom’s bakery. There is a great sense of control over material here. How long the MDF lasts and how it could be dusted by your servant is anyone’s guess.

If this show can be considered a place to sniff out trends in the local scene then halleluiah! Miniature painting and Islamic geometry have left the building. For now.But this is a show of art that tells us things the local Art Intelligentsia already knows. Which brings us to an important question: if there was a new, homegrown form, what would it be? The last time I checked, it was the cult of Rashid Rana’s thrilling videos of dangerous mirror images, but thank god there was no sign of a photomontage.

Trendy or not, these graduates will shake up our little art ecosystem. There are more and more international group shows at galleries and museums with hot young Pakistani artists. The spirit of Shahzia Sikander and the profitable potential of the Lahore Biennial looms large over 2015. Complacent artists toasting to their success at the moment will have to watch out. These graduates are young(ish), they’re already booked for shows, their prices are low and some of their work is way better than yours.

Salman Toor is an artist. He lives between Lahore and New York