Notes:
1) Titian-Tagore-Transition (2016) and Tantra from memory (2019)
This audio-visual sequence served (experimentally) as the curtain-raiser for the conference papers I presented with the Kathakali performer Janaki Nair. We wanted to open our discussion of Philip Rawson’s 1971 Tantra exhibition with a sensory provocation that had both Indian and European roots. Thus Titian-Tagore-Transition begins with Suchitra Mitra performing a song by the celebrated Bengali poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore, a recording that dates from the mid-1950s. This is followed by the jazz pianist Zoe Rahman improvising the same song with her brother Idris on Kindred Spirits, a CD released in 2012. Alongside this you also see a painting by the youthful Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) fade into a work painted by the same artist in 1576 at the very end of his long life. There is nothing especially Indian about sixteenth century Venetian art and yet, listening to Mitra sing, we sense that the flute – seen first with the nymph and then with the shepherd – would sadden us profoundly if played. Indeed, the song’s lyrics describe an ‘anxious light’ surrounding and disconcerting the listener as despondent flute music fills the air. Compare this with Titian’s last painting. According to Giorgio Agamben, the artist has pictured the exhausted sensuality and subdued melancholy experienced at the end of history, at the moment when all our anthropological privileges cease to operate (see The Open: man and animal). At this point our lecture would begin. The second part, a recent piece called Tantra from memory, shows me trying to draw the layout of Rawson’s exhibition in the absence of photographic documentation in the Arts Council of Great Britain archives. In the background a BBC programme, Record Review, can be heard on my studio radio. That Saturday morning (7th December 2019) the presenters were comparing different recordings of the Flower Duet from Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé.
2) Rituals of refurbishment: remembering/remediating Philip Rawson’s Tantra exhibition (2018)
This audio-visual piece was part of a Dorsett & Nair presentation given at ASA2018: Sociality, matter, and the imagination: re-creating Anthropology, a conference held at Oxford University in September, 2018. At the time I made the recording outside the Hayward Gallery, the original venue of the exhibition, my co-author was in India and so contributed to our debate via Skype.
3) The world is breaking up (2018)
This short video was made in my studio as a reflection on a paper presented at Variations, Rewritings and Adaptations of the Jātaka Tales and Buddhism in India Today (SARI 2016 Annual and International Colloquium, University of Paris 13). My retelling of the jātaka story known as The Timid Hare and the Flight of the Beasts involved a collapsing planet based on a ‘terrestrial globe’ made in 19th century in Orissa (now in the V&A Museum). This representation of land masses, rivers and seas featured in Rawson’s exhibition. My drawings, which feature throughout the video, were folded up into small boxes, numbered and gifted to friends interested in Rawson’s approach to exhibition-making. This idea comes from studying the beautiful Tantric diagrams I first saw at the Hayward Gallery. I’m told they were originally purchased on Indian streets as magic charms and then folded up so that they could be taken away.
1) Titian-Tagore-Transition (2016) and Tantra from memory (2019)
This audio-visual sequence served (experimentally) as the curtain-raiser for the conference papers I presented with the Kathakali performer Janaki Nair. We wanted to open our discussion of Philip Rawson’s 1971 Tantra exhibition with a sensory provocation that had both Indian and European roots. Thus Titian-Tagore-Transition begins with Suchitra Mitra performing a song by the celebrated Bengali poet and composer Rabindranath Tagore, a recording that dates from the mid-1950s. This is followed by the jazz pianist Zoe Rahman improvising the same song with her brother Idris on Kindred Spirits, a CD released in 2012. Alongside this you also see a painting by the youthful Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) fade into a work painted by the same artist in 1576 at the very end of his long life. There is nothing especially Indian about sixteenth century Venetian art and yet, listening to Mitra sing, we sense that the flute – seen first with the nymph and then with the shepherd – would sadden us profoundly if played. Indeed, the song’s lyrics describe an ‘anxious light’ surrounding and disconcerting the listener as despondent flute music fills the air. Compare this with Titian’s last painting. According to Giorgio Agamben, the artist has pictured the exhausted sensuality and subdued melancholy experienced at the end of history, at the moment when all our anthropological privileges cease to operate (see The Open: man and animal). At this point our lecture would begin. The second part, a recent piece called Tantra from memory, shows me trying to draw the layout of Rawson’s exhibition in the absence of photographic documentation in the Arts Council of Great Britain archives. In the background a BBC programme, Record Review, can be heard on my studio radio. That Saturday morning (7th December 2019) the presenters were comparing different recordings of the Flower Duet from Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé.
2) Rituals of refurbishment: remembering/remediating Philip Rawson’s Tantra exhibition (2018)
This audio-visual piece was part of a Dorsett & Nair presentation given at ASA2018: Sociality, matter, and the imagination: re-creating Anthropology, a conference held at Oxford University in September, 2018. At the time I made the recording outside the Hayward Gallery, the original venue of the exhibition, my co-author was in India and so contributed to our debate via Skype.
3) The world is breaking up (2018)
This short video was made in my studio as a reflection on a paper presented at Variations, Rewritings and Adaptations of the Jātaka Tales and Buddhism in India Today (SARI 2016 Annual and International Colloquium, University of Paris 13). My retelling of the jātaka story known as The Timid Hare and the Flight of the Beasts involved a collapsing planet based on a ‘terrestrial globe’ made in 19th century in Orissa (now in the V&A Museum). This representation of land masses, rivers and seas featured in Rawson’s exhibition. My drawings, which feature throughout the video, were folded up into small boxes, numbered and gifted to friends interested in Rawson’s approach to exhibition-making. This idea comes from studying the beautiful Tantric diagrams I first saw at the Hayward Gallery. I’m told they were originally purchased on Indian streets as magic charms and then folded up so that they could be taken away.
COMING SHORTLY: my new website project oldtantracatalogue.com goes live in October 2022. This is where I will be exploring the legacy of Philip Rawson's Tantra exhibition by reflecting on my arts-based fellowship at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies. Consequently, in the future, my folded drawings and sculptural works can be viewed on the new site.