What to do! What to do! That one professor for whom you can do nothing right. It's all a C, whether you give it A effort or not. Well then Miss J-, if nothing will satisfy you, then I shall satisfy myself. The following is an essay I wrote over the course of the night (along with two other essays for the same class) about a book that nearly killed me. Whatever you do, don't let Kajri Jain near a publisher. She does not know how to write. Her doomful tome, God's in the Bazaar, is a calamity of word wreckage. You know it's bad when I have to start a vocabulary list; it's worse when I stop because the list waxes superfluously interminable. Unfortunately I was assigned a paper on the tex; fortunately only four pages. I don't think I have ever struggled so much with so short a page length. Between 7pm last night and 12am this morning I agonized to organize a worthy outline. It's a bit of a challenge when you haven't understood more than say, every 20th word you read. When the clock struck twelve I abandoned all reason - why be reasonable with the unreasonable? - and took to inventing a paper on the whim of my thoughts. I even flipped through the book, snatching quotes that at least vaguely supported my non-argument. It's more of an imaginative musing. What can I say, I'm a creative individual. I might have drawn a cartoon to go with one of the other papers I finished last night...I might have...
- The Transversal of Indian Calendar Art through Spaces and Between Values -
...a response to God's in the Bazaar
Indian calendar art by its nature as an art form is an expression, like movement, of something larger and more complex than its individual elements, or even the configuration of those elements. It is an example of how a realized art piece not only fulfills the role and expectations of its creator, but how it passes through several other spaces, fulfills other roles, and takes on other values throughout its individual existence as well as the greater timeline of Art the concept.
Like movement, Indian calendar art is a thing: it occupies a space; it has palpable features; it is a creative articulation. Beyond these obvious parallels, Indian calendar art and choreography represent pieces of a greater story, fragments of a larger whole. Individual motions and images do tell vignettes of their own. However, they are inherently describing something greater than their individual elements or even the configuration of those elements. Calendar art and choreography are viewed as “things,” though one is an object and the other an action. Each one acts as a representative: one, a painting depicting deities on paper also marked by the days and nights as defined by our solar and lunar cycles; the other, a series of momentary images portraying relationships. Yet the two are more than substantive entities. Both the complete image and the choreography link to and grow from a historical framework of theoretical cultural values that, over time, are translated with variation into these material art form expressions. Jain maintains that, “any image is the bearer of a multitude of possible meanings, both potential and actual, that vary over time and in different contexts” (Jain, 319).
Clearly, Indian calendar art is not “just there;” it and other art forms are products that exist because of the particular values in a culture and, in their realized state, they move through the many spaces of the corollary society. The first, though not the greater, part of calendar art’s existence within the larger Indian culture passes simultaneously in a number of spaces later contradicted by opposite or “unlike” spaces: public and private, sacred and secular, Eastern and Western, traditional and modern, artistic/aesthetic and commercial/popular. Within these contrasting spaces, it fulfills different roles and takes on different values depending upon its role within a given space.
Calendar art’s dance through these spaces begins in the minds of men - publishers, artists, and upper level businessmen - where it is purely cerebral. As is necessary to build any marketing strategy (such as a Kellog’s campaign to sell more corn flakes), publishing companies must research their potential and existing market to determine the values and desires of the members of these markets. Based upon that knowledge, and any other determinable patterns as understood through the research, publishers are able to not only cater to taste, but also create desires and therefore expand the market; calendar art is something everyone participates in. The walls of each home, each shop, each office, each factory, each prayer room bear witness to the fact. Calendar art is, at this stage of its existence, merely as a commodity, or a potential commodity: mass produced and capital-driven, a process marked by an interest in commerce and studies of popular culture in order to create mass taste as well as cater to localized taste.
Niche markets exist to be reached or are created based on these localized tastes, defined typically by color choice and combination, subject matter (e.g. local landscapes, deities, historical and political figures), stylistic rendering (realism versus the fantastical), and other artistic variances. The art of the South, for example, is gaudier and mostly considered low art or the art of “the common man” in comparison to the finer, more delicate Sivakasi prints (Jain, 184). This “shouting” look is therefore considered a part of the commercial space.
Yet this is more than a box of cereal, which holds no sacred value at any point in its existence. It seems ironic that though Southern art is commercial, it still can and often does function in the sacred space as well. Corn flakes meet their end and their beginning in secularity – baking, boxing, and mindless crunching at the breakfast table. Calendars, Indian calendars, do more than hang on a wall. Images may begin in the minds of men and be rendered by men, but everyone buys calendar art from that open, public setting of the bazaar and removes it to the privacy of the home where, for many, that icon will serve as a touchstone, the materialization of a spiritual being to which one can bow and pray. That is the treatment worthy of a god. These images are a face to which a worshipper can turn to pay homage, supplicate, or meditate. Centuries of worshipful practice lie beneath present attitudes of respect.
As indicated above, a shift in space correlates to a shift in value. That shift begins in the time between when the seeking eyes settles on the image and the mind behind that eye determines to make the purchase. Someone has seen it and placed value and faith in it. Its purchase actually increases the image’s value in many instances because once in the private realm, the image receives honor and respect - treatment indicative that this art is seen and valued as more much than the sum of its parts – mere paper and ink. Only paper and ink, aided by an artist’s hand, came together to create a representation of something greater than human. The image is more than shapes, lines, and coloring; it is a deity, physical elements culminating in a spiritual being imaged on paper. And more than imaging a spiritual entity, the renderance bears undertones and overtones of cultural values as they are translated into imagery.
Calendar art’s ubiquity as well as its mass production and overflow from the bazaar raise questions regarding proper treatment of the sacred material. In private spaces there is no doubt of reverence, but in the journey from easel to factory floor to wall to worship the images pass through multiple value status that imply treatment greatly in contrast to that of an revered icon. The author, however, recounts Igor Kopytoff’s assertion that “in the course of its ‘cultural biography’ an object can move in and out of the commodity state” (Jain, 226). Despite their brief habitation of the commercial realm, Jain allays the fear that they run the risk of remaining permanently in the unnaturally secular space. “The sacredness of the iconic image is suspended as it is produced and traded (on the artist’s easel or the factory floor, in transit, or while displayed in a catalogue, shop, or stall), but it is able to return once the image leaves the realm of circulation” (Jain, 226).
The fact that art is indicative of a culture’s values and can flex and move through the menagerie of societal spaces, changing roles and gaining or losing value attests to the super-reality it offers as both a means of escape from and enlightenment of that culture. Jain explains that through the evocation of divine presences in the everyday, calendar art achieves “inculcation of a devotional attitude by bringing the gods to affective life” (Jain, 202). For though the color, subject choices, and scale of much Indian calendar art may not accurately reflect the reality of ordinary humanity, their arrangement and portrayal offers a new realism in technicolor.
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