Time is on my Side
Duration: 00:45:48; Aspect Ratio: 1.332:1; Hue: 8.102; Saturation: 0.030; Lightness: 0.309; Volume: 0.144; Cuts per Minute: 3.144; Words per Minute: 101.908
Summary: A presentation at KNMA, 2018 by Vivan Sundaram. The slide presentation and audio recording were edited together after his passing.
These are iconic figures of the youth radical culture who sound and words left their native
shores to speak of revolt and freedom across the world.
Recognisable is the iconic Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones and the title of the talk is based on this.
I expect you recognize this figure who has loomed large jumping from his more than 50 or 60 years ago to get the Nobel Prize for literature and I don't expect that I need to tell you his name.
And this very memorable song also reflects the moment and both sung in 64 is the beginning of the changes that I very much participated in.
In the same year 1964, Robert Rauschenberg won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale.
He was the youngest artist to date and this was just 70 years old the Venice Biennale to get this gold medal and this had a great impact on me and people in Baroda because of the famous slogan that he gave between art and life.
And in the same year 1964 came to Baroda pop art brought by an English painter from the Royal College of Art who I'll refer to later on Jim Donovan and he brought a kind of relationship to bring street art and film posters into the studio.
And Bhupen Khakhar and I we became close friends of his.
Two years later both of us had already emerged into being quite fully fledged pop and pop art already was a movement which was more open and inclusive than the earlier modernism and I think that the variations of pop globally have a much greater range because of the sense of local popular
culture that inflected far more greatly than all the previous isms that have taken place.
I'd like you to read this quotation I will foreground the multidisciplinary encounters of art that engages with figurative and narrative painting collage aesthetics abstraction the ready made found object documentary and feature films on history.
New wave cinema avant garde theater music sound works as well as referring to the radical politics of the May 68 period.
All this laid the foundation of my work over the last 50 years and to that extent you have evidence of it in this retrospective.
This is the first painting I did kind of more crude pop painting and I arrived in London when.
So metaphorically I say I arrived in London in the yellow submarine which was on the hit of the pops.
I encountered and it was very important for me at the Slade school was our big key time very sophisticated and far more complex pop painter than the rest of the both English pop and American pop.
I took to keep eyes quite obscure and complex structure is montage practice which he called agitational usage appeal to me also how the figurative references were framed and well collided with non representational forms.
And in the work here in the room you will see this attempt at a relationship between a complex of abstraction as well as a relationship to figuration.
A decade later Keith I proposed what he called a school of London and through Timothy Hyman the painter and critic who did a show called narrative painting led to a connection with which what has been formally called the school of Baroda.
And it is in the 81 that the seminal exhibition called place for people took place with Gulam Sheikh, Bopen Khakhar, Nalini Malani, Sudhir Patwardhan and Jogan Chaudhary.
I am very pleased that Jogan is also here and you have a whole room of my work of that period of the 80s.
The situation both in London as well as in the Slade School was dominated by what has been referred to as a Green Berge and the famous American critic and philosopher who propounded as a support for minimalist abstraction.
And Robin Denny who was a permanent teacher in the Slade School young and very dynamic and very confident as you can see these very large scale paintings of what would be called colour field and stripes.
And so a deep engagement with colour and Bernard Cohen was the other artist also following that tendency.
Here is an important person from the other side of this divide as I call it Peter de Franchia. The minimalist and colour field tendency was openly criticised both by Kitai and Peter de Franchia.
The Marxist expressionist painter and art historian who ran the general studies course at the Royal College of Art. In 1968, Itha Kapoor did her MA thesis under de Franchia in the title Inquest of Identity, Art and Indigenousism in Post-Cololian Societies.
His own position slowly evolved in working through this divide. This can be seen in the paintings in the room 68 as I mentioned.
A very important feature of the Slade School which Professor Coldstream who was a realist painter introduced into the Slade which other art schools had not done because he was head of something called the Coldstream Report.
Coldstream himself was involved in cinema and he asked Thorough Dickinson to come and join the Slade and start a film department.
Now it was unheard of as it has been said that cinema could be taught in the university but the little niche in the art school made it possible for Dickinson to start a remarkable course.
Here I arrived in September 1966, Thorough Dickinson who did both feature films and documentaries proposed a whole year of showing films on the Second World War.
Now in India I had no sense of what the Second World War. So it was a deeply moving and in fact very disturbing experience every week to see either a documentary or a feature film.
And this had a great impact on me. One of the first films that I saw was a remarkable film called Passenger by Andres Munch.
He died very early on doing a shoot to Auschwitz in a car accident and this film was in fact completed by his assistants.
I was a great admirer of Alan René and I'll show you later on how I worked on a particular film of his.
But this very haunting film that he did very early on as you can see in 1956 had a very disturbing effect on me.
I had 22 years later that is in the late 80s visited Auschwitz and also the last concentration called Birkenju and when I went there it was like the fact that I had lived with Auschwitz through these films
came back as a kind of relationship to something that had lived with for very many decades and this impacted me and much of the body of this work in the series called Long.
Strange abstraction but it's a very concrete thing and I don't quite have to tell you I'm sure you all know what it is about because having been there I couldn't believe that people could be defecating in the very spaces that they were living in.
This is the work that has been just removed from this wall so that relationship between art follows life and life follows art is something that I have worked with.
Now we come to the moment the high moment within this period of May 68.
As you can see that right from the beginning of the year the get offensive which is by the North Vietnamese army in confronting both the South and the Americans took place and this had a huge impact globally and more or less what we call the year of the barricades
was really launched by the Vietnamese assertion and it affected globally as we can see even from this calendar not just students which normally or to a great extent the May 68 student movement is privileged
but it actually did have a very direct relationship to an anti-imperialist movement which opposed the American presence in Vietnam.
This May 17th March it's almost 50 years to date is the first time that I went to a demonstration and I was completely naive about it and quite terrified at one level but there was something in the air that said you can enter you can go
because there are so many others that are entering it so it was Parikali and Vanessa Redgrave go take a petition to the American Embassy which is housed in Grovesner Square and the large number of students that were there and moved
but the other iconic figure you see him Mick Jagger and the song Sympathy for the Devil is apparently stated that he in his experience of being there will respond in a film which I will come to later which Godard made.
Also present were a very fine writer and playwright for Rukh Dhandi and from Delhi famous Marxist economist Prabhat Pathanayek.
Sympathy is not here.
But in amongst the peace-seeking crowd there was the outnumbered police.
This was an even bigger march that Parikali led some months later moving from Hyde Park to Fleet Street and Geeta had just come to London then and she joined in this march so I am very pleased that she is here today as well.
In April I travelled across Germany.
My sister lives in Hamburg and I thought I will take a route going south to Munich and I reached Berlin the day after the student leader Rudi Duchka had been shot.
I went to the technical university where scores of people who were injured by the police were lying in the corridors.
In this huge auditorium where Duchka is speaking some months before was the same place I spent very many hours and listening to these speeches which I didn't understand a word of but the whole energy, the whole vitality, the experience of seeing youth fighting against oppression had a deep effect on me.
In 1968 the Kudam has gone from shopping boulevard to protest hub against the Vietnam War.
The Springer Press, the dictatorship.
Rudi Duchka is the most prominent figure of the extra-parliamentary opposition.
As a result he is the main target of resentment towards the troublemakers and agitators.
On the 11th of April Duchka is shot and seriously wounded. The perpetrator is carrying an article from the radical right wing National Zeitung with the headline Stop Duchka Now or there will be a civil war.
I returned to England, London and Enoch Powell conservative but also a neo-fascist and particularly very anti-the Americans were making these anti-immigration speeches.
He came to university college which is where the slave school is and the student union decided rather than stopping him to involve the students to engage in his politics and make posters.
I was, as I said, quite apolitical but they said you have to join us and help us to make this and I think that this was another moment of those who the gods wish to destroy.
They first make mad. We must be mad. Literally mad as a nation to be permitted the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population.
It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.
Well, we now come to Paris, the center where the whole image of Paris being the center of this student uprising took place and that is Convendit was called the red student leader speaking.
But content to let the fight for their cause, whatever it is, just beat her out. Quickly the situation reverted to ugly street warfare but riot police giving no quarter and getting none in return.
May 68 in France was the real thing. Authoritarian French university system sparked a general strike that electrified the country.
They were anarchists, most of them. That was the spin.
The old left thought this new left was out of control.
This was just while all this was going on. It was in the last months of my doing my post diploma and there is a painting in the room called May 68 and Maya is a classmate of mine from Baroda.
It knows her well and that's Coldstream and Professor Dickinson. This was a very well known alternative art center called the Arts Laboratory in Duriland founded by the American Jim Haines.
In this there were both films run all through the night like Andy Warhol's 24 hours state building or sleep and they also had an exhibition hall.
Obviously one exhibition is being changed to the other but I was very privileged through Farouk Dondi who knew the person who ran this to give me a show.
The little room that you have here, these are the paintings that were shown there.
There were two specific works which referred to the political and the others as I said worked through aspects of abstraction.
South Africa also featured to a great extent. On coming to the art school in June I saw a bearded man seated on the steps and he saw me and smiled and he said I'm a Tunisian sculptor.
His name is Jean-Luc Messica from Paris and he was thrown out of France as being an étrange that literally that you are a foreigner and he had been to the Beaux-Arts to make posters and he said I will help make posters so the kind of posters you see here
I did along with him and even stuck them in the group of people who were sticking posters. So activism formed a very central part and continued to do so subsequently.
Here you have two persons, P. Adam Sidney who was a historian of American underground cinema and Stan Brackage one of the major figures of the American underground.
And Arby Keith I told me that at the V&A a remarkable show of Persian miniatures is taking place and I should go and see it and I was quite moved by the fact that he prompted me to go there and see that
and simultaneously on seeing Brackage's films who he made a statement that imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective and you can see that he is denying the relationship of the vertical and the horizontal and sense of depth
and I think a lot of this aesthetics certainly comes out of people like Jackson Pollock who painted, who used painting as a field removing particularly this what Brackage called Renaissance aesthetics.
And this is the painting there where the relationship between a swirling world going around and in the center are two spectators viewing strange and mysterious forms and for me the white patches also of course are references to having text placed on them as in miniature painting.
The previous month in the arts laboratory Yoko Yono and John Lennon had an exhibition and this is a film which somebody called Hugh Shaw who was very important in doing a show of tantric art
close to John Lennon and Yoko Yono asked me would I like to perform in bottoms, I was too shy to do so but it became an iconic film literally showing in Sharsbury Avenue as if it were a porn film and when Yoko Yono came here she said I have lost touch with my friend Hugh Shaw.
Another aspect of the art school situation and elsewhere also like in London economics was the occupation of these schools and the great architect Buckminster Fuller came and spoke continuously for four hours in the most electrifying experience that one can imagine.
Later in June I heard Arturo Schwartz one of the main authors of Duchamp's work on his new book titled the anal sexuality in Duchamp's work and Duchamp came to listen to this talk at the ICA this Center for Contemporary Art
and when the talk was over I happened to be near the exit and this frail man walked past me and he died a few months later and I said that this figure that has influenced possibly as many artists in the world from when his first ready made was made in 1913 has influenced they say as many artists as Picasso has
and I think that the relationship of the found and ready made but also the obscure imagery and the relationship to sexuality is there. This work again is in the exhibition.
Later on in July I had to go and study French in Paris and there Kumar Shani was doing a course in cinema as well as working with the great director Besson on the film.
I already mentioned about Alan René. Alan René also did remarkable films about memory about a bourgeois life but what interested me as a visual artist was and I was privileged that the 35 millimeter film that came to the film department
allowed me to have the film and actually copy the 35 millimeter from the reels to make slides and in my analysis 800 shots are there in a 115 minute film. I suppose in today's fast cut this would be quite conservative
but it was really very radical that René would think of memory but also foreground very much the still life so the whole film actually has a serious still lives which move.
Another great figure Filini and his eight and a half and what fascinated me again the aspect of the cyclical structure in his films.
From our first three children we were told that soon Christiane Sophie Henrietta the first born and Christian God loves the second son.
Straub is a major figure in new German cinema radical cinema and here he makes this film on Anna Magdalene Bach the wife of the great Bach and continuously as it said the number of children that Bach is bearing to her
and he has more or less still a camera and this music playing and I put this because in the same evening in Friends House in opposite King's Cross station Stockhausen did a concert in a large room as you can see here with electronic music
and after listening to him I went to the National Film Theatre to listen to Bach and so these moments of complete opposites of juxtaposition of form and structure also kind of daily experience that deeply continuously affected me.
Goddard has already been stated is a sort of figure that I greatly admire and Ashish Rajatak sitting here has spoken about some relationship of my work and Goddard
and I'm always very honored that is said and that is spoken about and in the beginning I also have a quote of Goddard's who speaks of precisely the different parts of figurative and abstraction and how they come together.
So this is a film about a middle class woman who has to survive through doing private prostitution although she's married but she goes to a cafe and this is one of the memorable scenes where sitting at this table this cup of coffee becomes another universe.
This is again done in the same year so you can see the two very different films and they are a direct critique of bourgeois society of them going to the countryside,
of being bought in a traffic jam and the relationship of how it brings the private world out onto the road so this is one long famous shot it's much longer than the clip that you see here.
Goddard in the same year proposed a film if I'm not mistaken the first time he actually shot outside France and came to England he first said the trade union rules were too tough for him but somehow he managed to get his producer who you see him talking then I'll tell you what happens a little later
to do this film with Mick Jagger performing.
Now I was involved with a agit prop group of people who with a 16 millimeter projector used to go around and showing films and somehow they got to know that Goddard was very unhappy that the producer removed the song sympathy for the devil which the rolling stones sing for seven or eight minutes at the end of the film
because he said the film is over so who will stay so he said that if you want to see the real film then demand the money be reimbursed and go and see the uncut version by a group of young people who are showing it outside
and he caught you can see this guy with the film and I happened to be there in the National Film Theatre and he caught him by the scarf and it is recorded somewhere that he shocked him and people were shocked this elite audience.
Me damn sure the fighter washed his hands and sealed his fate.
From the middle or end of 1968 my landlady inedited some money and bought this broken down house and a group of students.
Althea Jones is up there and Trevor Pateman and another group, another lot came and worked on in this house and the house became a very open space for a number of activities.
Hillary herself was a feminist and the address of the women's liberation workshop was in 154 Barnsby Road. Later on Althea Jones became one of the very active members of the English Black Panthers and in fact when the Berger got the prize turn up turn and oh sorry
the booker prize for literature he handed it over to Althea of the Black Panthers. At the same time the house also got people from the living theatre who were performing in the round house, a remarkable theatre group and some of the black persons lived in the commune.
So it was a space where the freedom to be together, to experience the diversity of theatre, political as well as experimental interactive is the famous Julian Beck.
At the other side Hillary befriended British woman the head of the bread and puppet theatre who did very strong political theatre and they also came and worked in what was called an adventure playground.
The group's processions involving monstrous puppets about 20 feet high became a fixture of protests against the Vietnam War.
This is a very major exhibition when attitudes become form and my own political activity completely was so removed from this kind of work. I just couldn't understand what it meant, what was the reason for it being done but as people know my work and some of it in detail you see in some of the work.
So sometimes when I believe that you don't understand work but you encounter it or experience it, it does enter you and as the title was, the exhibition was, live it in your head when attitudes become form.
John Berger, a great heartthrob of many people, he came to the Slade School of Art when this book was just released and he found only about seven people attended this famous writer's lecture on art and revolution.
And he said, it doesn't matter whether they are seven or seventy, you are obviously committed people and he spoke very passionately and of the seven, there was Geetha and myself and he said, come let's go to the bar and made contact, spoke about the anti-imperialist war.
And as some of you might know and Christian is sitting here, that the first Trinale and Gulam also, that Mulkraj Anand asked him to write forward.
I think first he was to be on the jury but he couldn't come and he wrote a very strong political anti-imperialist statement that countries like India would be in the leadership of forging an anti-imperialist position.
This photograph has become viral, taken again by Gulam Sheikh and shown in the Asian Art Archive.
Here is another movement which was called the Scotter's Movement and this is a building if you know Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road.
At that time it was built and just lying empty, so as part of this group I was used to go there and attend these meetings.
So in one sense this free life of being a kind of, shall I say, a kind of naive of entering into buildings of occupying them was part of the kind of anarchist position.
But such stories do come to an end and maybe come to an end in a more dramatic way.
This is a building whose Den Downing Street, an address that all of you would know, is the address of the Prime Minister.
And the Prime Minister happened to be Robert Wilson who was to go to America to meet Nixon and Tarik Ali once again led a very small march to oppose it.
And nothing very much happened, it was sort of a spring evening and I was in fact with the painter Praful Davi and from behind a big policeman came and he just picked me up and said, you will be arrested.
So I was arrested and this could be Windsor Castle where I could have been sent to but this is not Windsor Castle, this is, title will come up.
But the experience of spending 10 days in jail when the judge said that my background has to be looked into because people like myself are using the Queen's money and that they should be deported.
And I can only say that the 10 days I spent there and I will come to the end of my presentation is so vivid in my memory.
To begin with, it was a huge prison, 95 or more percentage of the prisoners are working class and not for a moment did I feel any racial attack on me or discrimination.
It's a prison where prisoners come from all over England and the very first night I was put in a room with a person who was in for murder, person who was for high bank robbery and so on and so forth.
I had the long hair that I had and I was told that this hair would be cut off and a whole group of prisoners went to the warden and said, no, it's his religion that he can have his hair and they said, are you a Sikh?
Do you wear a cara? They do all that and this is sorry.
So in front of 200 people literally where you have to sew mail bags, my hair was cut.
But in that process, I made a lot of friends, but suddenly I was given an order that you're not allowed to be with the other prisoners.
You will have to go into solitary confinement and I couldn't understand it.
But to them, they thought that I'm a political prisoner and I should not mix with the other prisoners.
The other prisoners had no idea what a political prisoner was.
So during lunchtime and during the time when one sewed mail bags, I met a whole cross-section of people and very briefly to say that apart from professional thieves and robbers,
a very large percentage were young working-class youth who had stolen a car and smashed it and were there in prison.
And I'll end with a man who was fairly old, very small and very charming, was talking to everybody as if he had always been there.
And he came up to me because he had seen what had happened to me and I asked him, since the Second World War, he has been unemployed.
And the only way to make money is to do petty thieving and so he's caught and he says, prison is my second home.
I get fed well and therefore a few months I'm sent out and I come back again.
So he asked me, where do you live? I said, 154 Barnsby Road.
He said, 145 Barnsby Road. I live in that area. There's a chapel market. I steal from there and I've gone by your place and it seemed to have nothing to steal.
The doors were open and you're from there.
And I can never forget this man who seemed to love his life there or stealing and living around exactly where I had lived and done activities.
So I will end with the good Lal flag because it was connected in some sense to May 68 movement.
We have a presence of communists and socialists and Maoists and Trotskyite.
And this is a work which I have told, Rubina was shown by Asha Lokhandwala in Bombay.
And when some of these works will go to Hausta Kunst, I will be replacing this work and others so you will get a chance to see it.
So some of these images you've already seen. So thank you very much for your attention.
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