Interventions in Landscape: Subodh Kerkar
Sabitha. T.P

Subodh Kerkar, an increasingly visible and innovative artist from Goa, confesses how he almost stumbled upon the installations on the beach that he has come to be associated with: “I had worked for some years creating innovative lamps in copper and tin.  I had made a few copper bowls, about a meter in diameter, as part of a lamp I was working on. One evening I put these bowls in my jeep along with some electrical cable and headed for the beach. We dug two craters in the sand, covered them with the copper bowls with electrical bulbs underneath them, ran the cable under the sand to a beach shack which obliged us with an electrical connection.  I switched on the lights and was stunned! I was looking at a mysterious effect on the seashore.” Thus was born his first series of installations on the beach titled The Tenth Planet.

The accidentality of this first creative brush with landscape sculpture and environmental art can be said to be characteristic of much of his work. However, it is an accidentality that is intellectually built into the work and offers a commentary on the artistic process itself. Often his work is an attempt to capture the ephemeral and the accidental in nature. The installations in lit copper cones on the beach titled Setting Suns is a case in point. Memories of Sunset on the Sand is another work that plays with the idea of transient sunlight. Subodh Kerkar acknowledges his artistic debt to Andy Goldsworthy in creating his memorial art of the transient. In an environmental installation titled Rice Goes for a Walk that he did in a children’s park in Panjim, Goa, he offers his homage to Goldsworthy who uses nature as material to create his art of the momentary, the passing. It is also at the same time an art that reflects the vitality and motion in nature.

The landscape painters of the “picturesque” movement  in the eighteenth century and the impressionists in the nineteenth had widened the subject matter that could aesthetically be considered “art,” bringing disorder and points of light into sharp focus. The “Land Art” movement of the 1960’s was an American Modernist response to the very idea of “re-presenting” landscape as much as it was a movement against the Abstract Expressionism of Pollock and de Kooning by taking the expressionist artwork out of the studio. Artists such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer created giant earthwork (the former’s Spiral Jetty in the Great Salt Lake of Utah and the latter’s Double Negative in Nevada) out of the mythical Western American landscape. Andy Goldsworthy, whom Subodh Kerkar considers his master in landscape art, acknowledges his debt to the American “Land Art” movement. However, Goldsworthy goes a step further in deconstructing the “monumentality” of works of art by focusing on the ephemeral. His sculptures are made of fragile and transient material such as leaves, twigs, petals, water and slivers of rocks.

Subodh Kerkar’s sea installations belong to this tradition of turning nature itself into the canvas and of intervening directly in the landscape to make art. However, Subodh Kerkar’s art cannot be faulted as being derivative. He brings a sense of locale and indigeneity with the choice of his material and the places he intervenes in. He uses mussell shells, palm leaves, used boats and sand with often the sea  as the backdrop. The sea is both outside and inside, form and material, subject as well as object. It is also relevant that the material is locally sourced, thus forming an intrinsic link between lived life, nature and art. Cones (cones of sand lit with concealed bulbs), Bamboo Lamps (rows of giant lamps made of bamboo on the beach) and Kalpavriksha (an instalation with palm leaves lit from below) too are examples of his use of light and local material. The material as well as the elemental and elementary forms that he uses act as a metaphor that evokes local culture and immediately intimate nature. His intervention in landscape, then, is at many levels: aesthetic, conceptual, material and political.

If the landscape artists of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries erased the political  in the service of the picturesque, Subodh Kerkar infuses the picturesque and the decorative with the political. Celebrations, with irkali sarees hung on rows of trees along the road in Saligao, was an interventionist attempt to call the attention of political authorities to the plight of marginalised migrant labourers. Metamorphosis, in which he covered trees with newsprint, too alerts the viewer to the urgent issues of deforestation and the dangerous consumption of nature’s resources. Kerkar is sensitive to the political potential of his work as a form of art that takes itself out of the museum to the people. His work, arresting in its dimension, invites the viewer to be a collaborator. It is not a work of art that is encased in museums and creates boundaries for touch. Kerkar’s works of art make themselves in the midst of people, with familiar and evocative material such as rocks, mussell shells, cow dung and palm leaves.

From the earliest days of his watercolours, Subodh Kerkar had a fascination for the play of light. His installations continue to reflect this wonder of light and shade. The lit trenches in Memories of Sunset on Sand and Sea Anemones are a metaphor for the ephemeral play of light as much as are the installations in clay with cut out figures of men and women which poetically evoke the moon and its soft, diffused light. In Mussel Waves (exhibited in Busan, Korea, 2006) too he plays with light in juxtaposing the dark outside of mussel shells with the white insides, thus creating an effect of light and shade. This fascination with light has taken him to glass as an important material for his new installations. Light diffused through glass calls to mind the sea and the play of light in the waves. Mussel Waves evokes the elemental form of waves with material sourced from the sea. Kerkar says that the sea, with its suggestion of infinity as well as mutability, has been his guru. Growing up in Goa with its many beaches, he spent much of his time in childhood watching the sea transform through the day, and watching too, the lives in and around the sea.

Memory of a Boat, the series that he is working on currently and is due to exhibit in Delhi in November, 2006, is characteristic of this aspect of his work. The materials used are parts of used boats with glass. There is a juxtaposition too, of the rough texture of the boat with the smoothness of glass, the darkness of wood with the translucence of glass in a dramatic encounter between the mythical and the modern. Parts of used boats are fused with lit glass-pieces shaped like fins or waves that suggest his long-standing association with the sea as his natural medium as well as inspiration. In this work he evokes the mythical quality of the sea and local memory. The marks of the rope-cuts on the boat and its “used-ness” bring up a tactile association with the sea and with the people who live off and around the sea. Kerkar’s art then, acts as a mnemonic device remembering the many ancestries of the sea with material that speaks of its genealogy.