 A
Pilgrimage of Images
Dialogues with South Asian Art
My paintings place different cultures in relation
to one another-the "high" culture of formal art and the
"low" culture of daily practice, but also these spheres
in American, European, African, and especially South Asian cultures.
Given the residue of imperial history in contemporary life, it has
not always been easy to shift these relations from hierarchy to
dialogue, nor has it been easy to include in that dialogue voices
that are usually off to the side, at best, both here and abroad.
Part of my decision to work outside academia, both
as a painter and as a communicator, comes out of my desire to learn
from those who aren't often asked, and to speak, back in America,
to those who live outside the richest and densest flows of ideas,
images, and scholarship from other places. In my travels, I have
spent as much time with Rajasthani hand-painters as with Sri Lankan
exhibitors, and I have spent more time with what we in the west
typically call "craftsmen" than with those who fill the
galleries and contemporary art museums of South Asia-the latter's
works suggest a different and equally valuable project, but distinct
from mine.
As a traveler, I have relished my days with school children asking
questions about my paintings and my asking them about theirs; my
memories are of tea shared with aged nuns, of meals and temple visits
with taxi drivers, of conversations on the lawns of the Lodi Gardens
with sweepers and retired contractors. I learn as much from clay
and cloth workers at New Delhi's National Crafts Museum as I do
from the new masters of formal painting. On my return, I make paintings
like the ones that accompany this proposal, full of birds and flowers,
pots and iconography, west and east, elite and common; I also take
my paintings to galleries and schools, showing the school children
of Appalachia tapestry and metal work, silk paintings and tabla
rhythms, words and ideas that would otherwise remain utterly foreign
in their diet of television and Playstation. I speak to university
students and to the contemporary incarnations of the classic Chatauqua
conferences where citizens discuss new ideas together in community
settings, and I collaborate on video projects that air on public
television.
I am, then, a painter, but I conceive of an artist's role more broadly
than the Hollywood portrait of a tortured loner in a garret, unknown
for forty years until a gallery and museum make (usually) him famous.
When I ask Fulbright to sponsor my travel through Nepal, India,
and Sri Lanka, I am asking you to help an otherwise unfunded professional
learn from (very broadly defined) artists and audiences in all three
countries, recording how they conceive their daily practice of Art-as
a discipline, as an ordering of experience, as a tradition inflected
by the fast-changing character of South Asian daily life, and as,
in some cases, a sacred practice sharing more with meditation and
ritual than with popular western conceptions of art as only self-expression.
And then, in my paintings, I will include the works of these artists,
but not simply to export their images because they are beautiful
things.
I quote South Asian artists, understanding how
their objects also open back into a long history of embodying in
forms the values and insights, the valences and the nuances of often
very long traditions; artists who are practicing especially at a
time when the erosion of all remembered graces grows daily in ferocity.
Of course I am also asking for the opportunity to gather the film,
the understanding, and the visual cues that will enable me to continue
the work I've begun with Appalachian schools, with institutions
like the program centers detailed below, with my collaborators in
public television, and, of course, in the paintings that I have
been making for more than fifteen years.
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