Lifestyle - A cut & paste job

Paper collages don’t figure too high in the hierarchy of the visual arts, in the contemporary Indian art scene at least. Pratiti Basu Sarkar, director of CIMA gallery in Kolkata, puts it very aptly, “If oils and acrylics are Brahmin, then collage is the lower caste.”

There’s no reason why that should be so. After all, collage as a mode of painting, as an expression of a fragmented vision of life, became quite hip in the hands of the surrealist painters in the early 20th century, especially Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.
There are a number of contemporary Indian artists working under the broad rubric of “mixed media” who stick a variety of stuff on their canvases — Mona Rai (mirrors, foil, gauze), Yogesh Rawal (paper), Hema Upadhyay (photographs) — and installation these days is a by-word for free-for-all. But of collages, in the high old sense of bits of paper stuck together to form an image, there are very few practitioners.
One, Shakila, has a rather large solo of around 50 of her works going on now at CIMA gallery. Shakila is a pure collagist, she makes no initial drawings, she doesn’t use a knife or other mechanical implements, and she doesn’t paint over the paper. She cuts paper with her hands painstakingly sticking them, strip by strip, to get the effect she wants.

And she uses paper with as much artistry as does a painter with his oils or water-colours, drawing out a range of colours and textures to create a very detailed tapestry of everyday scenes from her home in Nurpur near Baruipur on the fringes of urban Bengal —women washing utensils, layering dung cakes on the wall, the village shop, so on.
Shakila is a somewhat singular, even isolated phenomenon. Illiterate, this wife of a vegetable seller and mother of three has absolutely no training in the arts. It was B R Panesar, very senior artist and a noted collagist, who spotted her talent and got her the contacts and exposure.
Today, Shakila is a name that many in the art world recognise readily. Her works have been shown at the Bose-Pacia gallery, New York; Lafayette Art Gallery, Paris (where she was picked up by Pierre Cardin, informs Sarkar); she’s made installations for the Grameen Bank for the International Trade Fair in Hanover; a large number of her works have been acquired by the World Bank’s Delhi office.
But what about individual buyers? Sarkar says Shakila has quite an appeal among academics and sociologists as the “voice of the subaltern” (perhaps they also find her prices, from Rs 10,000-Rs 3 lakh, more affordable?).
Sharon Apparao of Apparao Gallery who represents Farhan Mujib, who specialises in paper collages, demurs. “The medium of collage is not a handicap in any way and collectors and connoisseurs who respond to art, also respond to collage,” she says citing the example of Mujib, “When he started, the small works were for about Rs 10,000 and now they are close to a lakh. The larger works are priced significantly higher.”

The only other artist who’s worked with paper making collages is Upendranath T R, a Cochin based artist, but even he’s moved on to other media like ink, ball-point, rubber seal and so on lately.
Initially, working with paper was for Upendranath a form of protest against mainstream art and traditionally accepted mediums, an instinct for rebellion that went “to such a degree that he used only recycled sharpened metal pieces for cutting paper”, writes Dorrie Younger in a catalogue that went with “Those who remain”, a huge installation on the “folly of war” that the artist put up a couple of years ago at the Kashi Art Gallery and which brought him a lot of attention.
Interestingly, all the three artists mentioned are largely self-taught — which says a lot about how paper collages are regarded by mainstream art. For Mujib, like Shakila, the medium happened by chance, they didn’t choose it. Mujib was a physicist and occasional painter who came back from a three-and-a-half year academic stint abroad to find that his oils and water colours had dried up.

“There was a stack of Span magazines and I picked them up. I thought why can’t I use the prints, the drapes, the textures, juxtapose them together and make my own?” Even the one celebrated instance of Benode Behari Mukherjee working with paper collages after he lost his sight would fall under the same category. Panesar too was a statistician before he turned to collage.
So why aren’t there more paper collagists around? One reason, says Sarkar of CIMA gallery, is the feeling that “collage is easy, a simple matter of cut and paste”. Panesar, who is something of a pioneering figure here, begs to differ. “It’s a very painstaking business where composition is everything. Working on even a small canvas takes as much as a month.” Little surprise that his later works are in oil and acrylic.

The other concern is archival value — how long will a collage last? Both Apparao and Sarkar feel that “If the artists use good paper and good non-acidic glues then it’s as good as any work on paper.” But some amount of pre-treatment is required — for example, CIMA supplies Shakila with her canvases. “However, we advise buyers not to put it in bright sunlight,” says Sarkar, adding, “So far, no one has come to us with complaints.”