Art Interpretation India & Letter India 2011

Art Interpretation India & Letter INDIA 2011 & THE LETTER TO OTTAWA It's hard not to connect with the commonality of these two pieces: they are both comments and complaints. They each reflect what could be but what is not; perhaps what used to be but is no longer. It is difficult to tell if they reflect anger or disappointment or are just a call to make sure things get better. There is no doubt that each reflects some reach out for action. INDIA 2011 The story of my experiment with truth.

Erik Olsen tells me of his uncertainty of the results of this piece alongside the ways that he presents the perfect, the medicinal, the successful and the ideal. Yet the way he does it is with a presentation of opposites of a sort in a way that it cannot really be clear what he thinks. It is an experiment, and one lives with the results of an experiment instead of proclaiming excitement about its findings.

Doing otherwise might suggest that the investigative artist had a plan for the outcome, which seems unscientific, lacking in objectivity, untrue in this instance. There are several parts of this work that go together. He identifies his comments on death and destruction. He makes connections with modern capitalism and shows how it has good and bad results. Then he idealizes what is commanding about a piece of the land and a visionary person who is at the least Faking It. Death and destruction is what the beast walks upon.

Fire curls up his legs, fallen trees, trash; the leftover from all that someone or something else has done to the place and the spaces. The elephant did not do it even with his or her powerful influence. Oil perhaps. The taking of things for sure. "It's all up from here" he says at the elephant's feet, right beside the skull and bones. There are people always coming. More and more people steadily adding to the actual size of a population that is getting larger.

They have something to do with this. Faith has something to do with it, though I cannot tell whether it is good faith through religion or bad faith because of religion. Commercialism runs rampant. WOW. American made perhaps. New. Full Power. 24 hours. 50 Rupee buys what? It's hard to know where some comments belong. Mass Slums. Shanty.

Are they death and destruction or the wonders of the actual size of the nation and its opportunities, some better clearly than others? We think of the ugliness of the waste of these places, but the artist sees Hero Bikes. Take what you will of this. Horn Please. What I find most interesting in a way is the artists use of two iconic representations of a person and a place. Modern Amrita She Gil is the person. Kantakumari (Kanyakumari?) the place.

The place is a district on the extreme southern end of the country. Interestingly, it is a place on the sea where three bodies come together as one, the waters of the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean. What this means exactly isn't clear, but the Gods seemed to favor the location as a place of healing. In Hindu legend the piece of land was dropped from above and would become the place in the hills where the medicine lives.

Today it is also a popular tourist site where one can watch all that is going right or wrong with India. The painter must know this. Modern Amrita Sher Gil is a recognized artist who carries a great deal of Indian legend in her own right. She was very famous and her works made people much money. Interesting, like Erik Olsen, she gathered her artistic experience from outside and then turned it back inside, in this case to India. Erik may be looking to or from India.

I found this quote in a piece about Sher Ghil's works, "She came here not as a foreigner attracted by the 'picturesque' India, and the exotic sights and smells; she came here as an Indian in feeling and spirit and with a mind to make this land her home. Despite her training in western art, she had complete awareness of and deep respect for India's artistic traditions." The people she often painted about where said to be thin, emaciated, suffering from hunger perhaps of poverty and neglect.

References say she is "the most expensive painter" in Indian artistic history. Her works were the subject of a famous India novel called "Faking it." Wow! That's interesting. LETTER TO OTTAWA DEAR VICKY IV By Joanne Cardinal Schubert, this piece is red in its message. Hot too, like India with its feet of fire, but more angry hot.

An angry letter perhaps from her to someone hurt by the exploits of some and the conditions felt by others; a letter to her by someone who things of the artist's opinions as being wrong, perhaps too gentle for the truth. Clearly, it is not the first of such letters. There is a big house and a little house on this reservation.

The little about the abuses of alcoholism, and the big one about bigger issues like the destruction of the place of the Natives and the reasons for the damning of the river of rains or maybe other kinds of river of hate or pessimism and destruction. Losing their land has been killing their people for more than a century. Today it is seen in the destruction of the young through alcohol and drugs. As Long As this continues the writer of these thoughts has red energy maybe.

In the Big House there is a map to something different. The animals of the past are there but even they don't seem certain as to what is expected or what purpose they serve. There.