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"Sometimes when I put the paper down to draw, for a long time I leave it there trying to think of what I’m going to make. I always think maybe it will be better this way – or that it will be better that way. And sometimes when I really get stuck, I just go ahead and draw. A lot of times, I don’t make what is in my head because, as I go along, it even gets better." — Kenojuak,
celebrated "I only draw
what I think, but — Pudlo Pudlat
The
two artists whose words I
cite above would, some time back, have been described as Eskimos. But
the term has slowly started fading out, for it is seen often in a
pejorative light. Inuit is the term currently in use, descriptive as
it is of ‘culturally similar’ indigenous people inhabiting not
only the vast arctic regions of Canada, but also Siberia in Russia,
Alaska in the United States, and parts of Denmark. Wherever they live,
however, theirs is a land "hidden in wonder and snow, or
sudden with summer", In their regions,
cold as cold can "Land stares at the sun in a huge silence Endlessly repeating
something we cannot hear
Inarticulate, Arctic Not written on by
history, empty It leans away from the world with songs in its lakes Older than love, and lost in the miles." From this land of ‘wonder and snow’ has been emerging for some six decades now art that is at once traditional and very modern: Inuit art, which has become "one of Canada’s symbols at home and abroad". Some of it is currently on view in Delhi, the result of collaboration between the National Gallery of Canada and the National Museum of India, with the support of the governments of the two countries. There are some splendid objects in the show: made from diverse materials, ranging from steatite or soapstone and walrus ivory to caribou antlers and sinews and dog fur. There also are stone cuts and stencils and serigraphs, sketches made on Japanese paper with colour pencils and felt-tip pens, figured textiles using felt and embroidery floss. It is a bit bewildering, the range of materials, considering how insular and mentally distant the Arctic region remained for centuries, since time immemorial in fact. But somehow in the art that is being made there, now things are coming together. The past and the present are fast melting into each other, it would seem. The change that has come about in the Inuit regions over the last century has been remarkable, not easy to absorb for most. For as far as memory goes back, an Inuk — this is the word for an Inuit person — would tell you, there were few incursions into the homeland: that ‘vast expanse of taiga and tundra, mountains and lowlands, waterways and ocean, polar ice and permafrost’. Men and women lived in ice igloos during the winters and tupiqs — tents made from animal skins — in summer. Men hunted for food and women made clothing from polar bear, caribou and seal skins. Trapping and hunting and whaling were means to life and livelihood. Shamans ruled their lives, with their ability to commune with the other world and their healing powers. And then came traders and missionaries, most of them at the beginning of the last century. In return for furs and pelts, the traders brought them rifles and copper kettles and little trinkets, and the missionaries their Christian doctrine. It is a familiar story. It is from within this welter of change — governmental, societal, technological — that a new Inuit identity, and with that new Inuit art, has been emerging for the last 50 years or more. There are many aspects to this narrative but somehow, miraculously one might say, the art of the Inuit has never quite lost its soul. Over most of the works that gifted men and women have been turning out — some of them acutely aware of art ‘elsewhere’ — there still hang, as if suspended in the air like a benign cloud, those complex metaphysical and spiritual beliefs that had moved ‘the Elders’, and shaped their lives. One can almost see this in specific objects. The ‘Enchanted Owl’ speaks to them in a tongue that they seem to understand; the "Man Wearing Snow Goggles’ appears to be seeing as far and thinking as deeply as did his ancestors perhaps; the lovely ‘Goose’ comes possibly from the story of the naked women, who flew away in terror ‘in the form of wild geese’ when a man stole their clothes as they were bathing. I remember having seen, years ago, a film on one of the most celebrated of ‘Eskimo’ artists — Kenojuak — made by the National Film Board of Canada and having been struck by the charmingly hesitant but deeply felt manner in which she spoke about her ‘own’world, in which reality and fantasy, ideas and images, kept moving in and out of one another. In her person, as in her work, one could see at once great sophistication and utter artlessness. It is, however, a shaky world and how long can this innocence be saved would remain a question. For there is the ever-present danger of genuine art slipping into the nether-world of sheer commercialism. In curious ways, the situation reminds me of one nearer home: in the tribal areas of Madhya Pradesh, now parts of Chhattisgarh. The art of the ‘indigenous’ people of that region — an iconic figure among them was that of Shyam Jangarh, who was taken to be exploited by some art entrepreneur to Japan where he, overcome by sheer loneliness, committed suicide — once dominated by their own set of beliefs and ideas, is now suddenly everywhere, having been identified as a saleable commodity. These are worrisome times.
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