Neither Tree nor Ashes

Tami Katz-Freiman in Conversation with Shanthamani. M

Introduction

In Shanthamani. M’s work, the material is the central axis, a point of departure as well as an interpretive conclusion. It is at once the support, the mythical origin, the carrier and the meaning of the work. Coal, with its rich associations as a major source of energy, is the main speaker, or narrative voice in her oeuvre. It speaks of a dynamic of tension between tradition and modernity, about accelerated processes of development and urbanization, about the exhaustion of natural resources, about the exploitation of workers in coal mines, about complex ecological issues, about globalization and consumer culture, and about the relations between nature and culture, the body and the environment, matter and spirit.

I first met Shanthamani while co-curating a group exhibition of contemporary artists from India (“Critical Mass,” Tel Aviv Museum of Art, 2012, together with Rotem Ruff).  Our conceptual point of departure had to do with matter (rather than spirit, with which India is often associated) as a metaphor for contemporary life in India’s large cities. In the following conversation, we return to this point of departure and to its use as a catalyst for discussing the works.

Shanthamani lives and works in Bangalore, a city that has undergone an accelerated process of urbanization over the past decade, becoming a metropolitan center that is home to international corporations and factories threatened by collapse due to the absence of necessary urban infrastructures.  Globalization has artificially introduced Western imagery into local culture, leading to various types of cross-cultural hybrids. This hybridity is given expression in Shanthamani’s work, which involves a double process of material and thematic recycling. In addition to recycling charcoal, she makes use of familiar Western myths and endows them with new meaning. Her previous works featured representations of ancient myths or cultural icons – Venus, the Tower of Babel, the hands from Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, a dollar bill, and Icarus’ wings. The laborious process of sculpting these images using small pieces of charcoal transformed them and tied them to the global present, lending them the appearance of cultural firebrands.

The thematic connection between the works in the current exhibition is nature – an overturned tree, a huge tsunami wave, a flying landscape, blind birds and winged pupae; their most significant common denominator, however, is the fact that they are all made of charcoal or burnt bamboo. Coal, charcoal, graphite, and ashes are all related to carbon, are all black, and all have a similar effect in defining the sculpture as a burnt object in the process of extinction. Charcoal is the last stage preceding the disintegration of wood into ashes, while still carrying the imprint and memory of the tree’s form prior to its disintegration. As such, it serves as an allegory for an intermediate stage between being and nothingness.

Fire Scripts (2016) – the first sculpture greeting visitors to the exhibition – resembles a set of wooden shelves featuring 47 lumps of charcoal, each marking a year of the artist’s life. This is the laboratory, the materials library presented to the viewer in order to acquaint him with the raw material, as well as a kind of self-portrait. The exhibition’s concluding work – Still Life (2015) – similarly features sculptures arrayed on a shelf. In this case, they are charcoal containers – bottles, vases, and jars in different styles – a dark, Morandi-style monochrome of containers becoming the content, surviving firebrands or fossils in the aftermath of a catastrophe.

In the following conversation, we attempt to decipher the meanings embedded in charcoal, and the ways in which it is used in her work.

T.K.F.: When did you start working with charcoal, and what led you to this decision?

S.M.: I started working with charcoal after a startling experience of meeting a pregnant woman who had lost everything and everyone in her family during the 1995 Hindu-Muslim riots. Her dwelling was completely burnt down and not even one person attempted to help her and take her to a hospital. The male members of her family were all hiding, fearing arrest. As I left, the last sight I saw was this woman standing alone against the sunset, her burnt house in shambles around her, slowly fading away into the dark. The pregnant figure became a metaphor for the atrocities of our lifetime, but also an embodiment of endurance in the face of total destruction – she represents a woman’s Phoenix-like capacities. The first work I did with charcoal was part of an exhibition called “Silence of Furies and Sorrows: Burning Pages of a City” (Bangalore, 1995), which tried to give voice to those victims.

T.K.F.:  Charcoal has served since the dawn of civilization as an expressive means of creating drawings. It is also related to coal, a non-renewable resource that is dwindling rapidly due to its accelerated use to produce electricity. It was one of the quintessential symbols of the industrial revolution due to its use to power steam engines. This mineral is formed of plants and trees that were part of early ecological systems, and that underwent various biological and chemical processes over hundreds of thousands of years before they were transformed into coal. Can you tell me what it is exactly that attracts you to this material?

S.M.: Wood charcoal, the medium I use in many of my works, is perhaps, one of the primordial mediums of human expression, as manifested in cave paintings. Various civilizations and ethnic groups within India and across the globe used coal for various ceremonies, from birth to death. It is a morbid yet solid material, which is suspended in an in-between state, neither tree nor ashes. Charcoal’s inherent capacity to express the polarity of life and death helps me to deal with multifarious issues in my works.

T.K.F.: At present, this basic mineral is interwoven with economic, political, technological and ecological issues. Visual art has dealt with nature and landscape imagery throughout history. Today, a growing number of artists are concerned with ecological imbalances. Could you elaborate on the ecological aspects of your work?

S.M.: I believe that the environmental calamities we are currently experiencing are nearing an apocalyptic state. Just look at phenomena like the tsunami, the endless burning of forests, the uprooting or cutting of trees, and the related annihilation of cultures. Instead of finding value in what we had, we arrogantly destroyed it and then got into a frenzied panic about coping with the hostile condition we ourselves have created and called progress. The burnt objects in my work represent a fragmented, fragile, precariously balanced condition. More specifically, carbon has been scientifically shown to sustain every aspect of life and to relate to every other form of matter in the universe. It is part of the birth-death cycle of our biological world. I was interested in the transformation of carbon from its primary state, which is Carbon Monoxide. Seventy percent of the mass in the universe is made of carbon; every aspect of our being, from our physical bodies to our intelligence, include carbon elements. This way of locating myself in a socio-scientific arena that involves a complex political polemic has given me a voice and the power to express my opinion, which is not easy for an average woman in India. Using charcoal is therefore not simply part of a formalist exploration, but rather an investigation that raises questions about the relations between the self and the nature/culture paradigm. I chose to reflect about the angst and nervousness that characterize our collective psychological state, using charcoal to give expression to a burnt, evaporated, fragmented and brittle form of life.

T.K.F.: Do coal and charcoal have specific meanings in an Indian context?

S.M.: In India, coal has special meaning as one of the country’s only plentiful natural resources. Wood charcoal is available in abundance in India, and is still used as fuel for cooking and ironing in both rural and urban areas. It was immediately accessible for my initial explorations. I have also used bamboo charcoal and carbon fiber in the works in this exhibition, and I am exploring graphite and other carbon products.

T.K.F.: One of the central sculptures in the exhibition, Upside-Down Tree (2016), is an inverted tree hanging from the ceiling with its roots in the air, and it is indeed made of a cluster of bamboo fiber molds. Here too, the material is the content – wood made of wood. I understand that your decision to create a fiber cast of bamboo stalks for the exhibition was due solely on technical constraints. An uprooted tree is a Romantic metaphor for an existential state of being uprooted and of migration, detachment, and homelessness. It represents a very violent act, and in an Indian context, I assume this image is also charged with a political resonance. Is it related to man’s desire to control nature, is it a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of belonging, or is it charged in a more specific way?

S.M.: Currently, in the developing world and specifically in India, cutting and uprooting trees on a mass scale is a common sight. I witnessed the uprooting of 40,000 trees in a single year in Bangalore in the name of creating a global city. The image of an inverted tree, however, represents spiritual growth and the relationship between mind and body. In Jewish Kabbalah, the inverted tree represents the nervous system: the roots are the cranial nerves, with the branches spreading throughout the body; it also represents the cosmic tree rooted in heaven, whose branches manifest creation. A similar tree is mentioned in the Bagavathgeetha: “The banyan tree with its roots above and its branches below is imperishable […] The root of the tree is at the top – because the root of the universe is Brahma – the original creator of things, and Brahman – the ingredients supplied by the transcendental Godhead with which Brahma creates. That is the root that is at the top of everything […] the material world is a tree that is constantly changing.” There is also a reference to an upside-down tree in the Upanishads, which symbolizes the relationship between heaven and earth.

T.K.F.: Why did you choose to use bamboo and not another type of tree in this work?

S.M.: Bamboo charcoal is another natural material that has been brought to attention recently as an alternative source of energy. China and India are the largest bamboo-producing countries. Apart from its traditional usage for house construction, cooking, storage, and textile production, bamboo with silicone elements in it can go up to a very high temperature, replacing coal consumption. Additionally, there is a possibility of extracting 82% pure ethanol from this fast-growing grass. Yet although this alternative material gives an impression of being a natural resource with a minimal impact on the environment, our ambition to replace coal and fossil fuel has another kind of implication: whether we dig earth for coal, or grow bamboo in large quantities that will ruin the landscape.

T.K.F.: The second central sculpture in which you make use of bamboo is Flying Landscape (2015) – an earth-like expanse composed of a dense grid of short bamboo charcoal tubes resembling burnt grass or shrubs, which you hang from the ceiling like a carpet hung out to dry, or an expanse of earth dropping out from under one’s feet. Is this sculpture based on an encounter with a specific image?

S.M.: The idea for Flying Landscape came to my mind from my long-term observations of vegetation and its annual growth patterns. Every year, by February or March, with the early morning dew and sharp sun light, the grass seems to be catching fire and the entire landscape turns black. As one watches this vast black landscape intensely, one notices black shapes moving within it – small migratory birds that fly up into the sky in groups as one approaches. This connected me to the stark reality of losing ground, of losing the earth’s green cover by mining it to forward our endless consumption of natural resource.

T.K.F.: Birds also appear in your sculpture Nose Dive (2015), yet here you are not concerned with a group of migratory birds, but rather with ones that have lost their spatial orientation and are crashing to the earth. Their black feathers call to mind images from ecological disasters such as the images of the badly oiled cormorants from the First Gulf War. You told me that the idea for this work is based on the phenomenon of birds losing their orientation or hitting glass buildings due to their spatial confusion concerning glass roofs or metal surfaces resembling water. An additional creature charged with ecological context is the winged pupa in the work Moth (2015). At first glance, the pupae clustered together and wound around a cord that dangles down from the ceiling resemble body parts or a fruit garland. What, for you, is the meaning of the pupae?

S.M.: The image of a winged pupa emerging out of its cocoon is about birth. When carbonized, however, it gives the impression of being born dead. It symbolizes possibilities, even in a dead zone. I was also interested in the verticality of the installation; it is very fluid, flowing down like a creeper.

T.K.F.: At the last Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014), you exhibited a major piece in the main courtyard. It was a monumental sculpture of a backbone – vertebrae made of cinders that resembled the vestiges of an extinct prehistoric animal. In the current exhibition, you present a smaller version of the work Fire Scripts II (2015), the only work that alludes to a human figure, which acquires a painful significance in the context of other carbonized natural vestiges. 

S.M.: The skeleton that holds our body upright is an age-old metaphor for many centrifugal elements in nature and culture. Rivers are considered the backbones of human civilization. The economy is the backbone of our development. In Kochi, in the context of the exploration and convergence of different cultures, my 70-foot long vertebrae were indeed an attempt to reflect upon issues of history, archaeology and progress. In the context of the current exhibition, it represents, together with the other burnt objects, the archaeological remnants of civilization.

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Epilogue

At times, writing about art leads you to surprising insights and fields of knowledge you never thought you would access. This is how I learned what I must have missed in chemistry class – that charcoal, diamonds, and graphite are various forms of the same chemical element carbon (C). Charcoal is an amorphous material – its atoms are not ordered in any predefined form. Diamonds are constructed as three-dimensional lattices of carbon atoms whose different layers are strongly connected. Graphite, by contrast, is defined by such strong connections only among the carbon atoms in a single layer, which are arrayed in hexagonal structures. These qualities cause graphite to be soft and make it into an efficient tool for drawing or writing. In diamonds, the atoms are arranged in tetrahedral (pyramidal) structures, in which each atom is tied to its four neighbors. This is a stable structure, which accounts for the outstanding resilience of diamonds. Metaphorically, if charcoal represents annihilation, diamonds represents eternity. Yet art succeeds where chemistry fails: Shanthamani. M’s works seems to transform charcoal into diamonds.