"It's hard to believe that
people can even make art here"
Michal Glikson is presently studying her masters in painting at Baroda School, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat. In 2008, she was invited as artist -- in resident to the National College of Arts, Lahore, where she gave a presentation of students work from the Baroda School and showed the Baroda series. The Lahore Series evolved out of her internship in NCA's specialised miniature painting department and has been shown in Baroda in tandem with a presentation of students work from the NCA, Lahore. Lahore Series was exhibited in May 2009 at Damien Minton Gallery, Sydney, Australia. Excerpts of interview follow.
By Naeem Safi
The News on Sunday: How did you end up in this part of the world all the way from Australia?
Michal Glikson: My interest in this part of the world began when I was studying politics as a secondary degree to my fine arts degree and I became really fascinated by imperialism, colonisation, and particularly the links between the colonisation of Australia and the exploitation of the subcontinent by the British Raj. So it was following the trail of the British and their empire that I first went to India.
Then in 2006, I was really interested in the connections between the kinds of news coverage that we got about the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and the links between that kind of media coverage and the old history of British exploitation. It was some kind of fascination with wanting to understand why the news coverage would be so skewed, linked historically to the old patterns of exploitation. That's why I really wanted see for myself what was really happening at the scene of the earthquake or what had really happened to people on the day that it caused the kinds of media coverage that we got in Australia which presented the Kashmiri people in a very bad light. I was quite sceptical and was interested in finding the root of that feeling people's stories. TNS: You exhibited at Rohtas a few weeks back, how did that go?
MG: There was not a large turnout but the people that were there seemed to really enjoy the work and I got some very nice feedback particularly in the guest book. People really seemed to grasp where I was coming from, which was a place of not just compassion but more a place of wanting to make connections, to actually step into the shoes of people.
TNS: What made you choose children as a primary audience?
MG: The works are done for children and adults but I hoped to engage children's attention, to capture the other end of what the media wasn't presenting -- media was presenting a sophisticated kind of view that you get from the lens of the camera and the flashy sensation. I was hoping to present the kind of story that you get upon reflection and that speaks to children in terms of the language that they speak when they are beginning to draw. In making the works I felt like a child a lot of the time.
The style is one of a childlike simplicity. I don't attempt to mimic the way children draw but I do comment in the style of the drawing in ways the things that stand out to children, which are colour and a sensitivity of line. At this stage I didn't want to present this view as an exquisitely controlled experience but to be one much closer to the surface of the skin.
TNS: Do you believe in the bourgeois and humanitarian divisions of art?
MG: I think it is a reality and I wish it wasn't there. Many people are in denial of that and we have to ask whose interest it serves that they continue to deny that schism. There is a lot of money to be made out of denying certain schisms in our society -- there is a lot of money to be made by denying that chocolate makes you fat.
TNS: How do you feel about the local art scene, especially in relation with the socio-political challenges that this region is going through?
MG: This is going to sound kind of tough, but it's hard to believe that people can even make art the way things are in Pakistan, similarly in India or Australia for that matter. And this is because there is such an enormous distance between the people making works and the people suffering the issues. There are people making works who are trying to reach down into the issues, but there is such a great socio-economic and political distance between the makers of the works and the sufferers; and then again a distance between the makers whose works get seen and the makers whose works don't get seen. It's kind of like an enormous beast not going anywhere and tripping over itself, because the thing is who is enjoying or reading the works.
It's not that I think that things are much better in Australia, where we don't have a huge gallery-going audience. But the gap between the gallery-going audience and the non-gallery-going audience is a little smaller than it is here. Here it's like people are making out whilst riding a serpent. And you can see the serpent of the country waving around and these little artists on top almost sucking their thumbs but trying to look at the serpent and make-work.
The role of the artist has largely become of someone who sits on the periphery of society and sucks their thumbs. And sometimes they make a lot of money by doing so, and they come into the centre and then go out again. But they are not regarded as a writer of books; they are regarded as somebody who is in some kind of basket or rocking chair.
TNS: What is the alternative to sucking thumbs?
MG: There is a wonderful book that really attacks this kind of predicament and that's the The Reenchantment of Art by Suzi Gablik, in which she talks about how a whole new epoch of the way we regard and make art has to begin and has begun and it really sets a challenge that everybody who is making anything ought to really a look at.
I am grappling with it myself and not succeeding but we must grapple with it. And that is, that people who make things should be putting themselves right on the street in the face of the things that needs to be re-made. It's a literal agenda that she proposes; it's as literal as a new architecture that is efficient, and in its efficiency beautiful, and in its beauty democratic. It's about a new way of recycling and organizing our garbage and not just making art out of garbage but actually programming into the very way that society is operating. It's difficult to describe in words but the process or the product has to really be something that people can use.
For me that was the most rewarding aspect of the whole earthquake story thing, the process of actually sitting down in some field with some people who had lost so much and doing a portrait of them as beautifully and truthfully as I could in the given circumstances.
Their stories weren't really getting out there. Journalists had come and gone, snapped pictures and left. One of the things that every creature really thrives on is energy. In the end, for me, it was not about making pictures, although the end product was something that people could see, but the actual experience.
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Published in The News on Sunday
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/aug2009-weekly/nos-02-08-2009/enc.htm#2
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