art of Jagath Weersainghe, Celestial Fervor

A prelude to an exhibition
Anoli Perera

Jagath Weerasinghe's latest series of works titled Celestial Fervor brings together a number of elements that has determined some of his major artistic conceptions  over the last 20 years interrogated within  his overall art practice. Given the fact that Weerasinghe is a deeply politically conscious and socially sensitive being, his art cannot be summarized merely within an art historical discourse without really venturing into a larger socio-political canvas that includes his own habitus, in a Bourdieuian sense.  Therefore, I would like to look at his art practice and emphasize on certain moments and events starting from his first major exhibition Kansawa (Anxiety) held at the National Art Gallery in 1992, the first public instance where his political and art ideology  was contextualized which had evolved and matured during his post student days in Sri Lanka and  American years as a graduate student.  To a great extent, I  am privileged as a writer to observe and articulate on Weerasinghe's conceptions and thought processes here because of my proximity to him as a fellow artist, a friend and a comrade in most post 1998 art activities and  interventions undertaken or initiated by him, and having the opportunity to engage in numerous discussions, disagreements and reconciliation of opinions with him. I am also not without knowledge about how perilous such proximity can be to one's own perception, and I will try to navigate my reading of his life and art objectively to the extent possible within my own biases and convictions. For Weerasinghe the division between life and art is so closely intertwined that it becomes necessary to include both together in any reading of his work.

Born to a dominant Marxist bourgeoisie father and a home-making mother, and growing up in an urbane middle class environment, Weerasinghe was probably exposed early on to the sympathies of the localized Marxist political ideology, its limitations and its contradictions when it came to class struggle, gender politics and social change. His almost consistent identification with the marginalized and the underprivileged (perhaps picked up from the Marxist orientation at home), and his predilection for the subaltern is something that continues to underlie his political ideology.  His restless years at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies (now University of Visual and Performing Arts) engaging in student politics, the rude awaking to the 1983 ethnic riots, the awareness of  the JVP and government killing fields in the period 1988-90, and his own violent confrontations with authority, back-grounding an ethnically tempered civil  war, obviously marked his conscience deeply and led to realize the fundamental flaws in the Sri Lankan national psyche which boasts of its 'Dharmishta-ness', Buddhist-ness and Sinhala-ness,  an almost holy threesome which often collapses into one composite and potent entity.  I would like to read Weerasinghe's work within three aphorisms.  One is his own constant guilt for the pathologies that the society (which he is part of) has inflicted and continues to inflict on its people and his inability to decisively intervene in this situation. The second is his realization of the magnitude of the destructive male power, the chauvinism of the phallus that manifests in different forms and forces, from gender politics to ethnic politics, from religious fundamentalism and enhanced puritanical moralism to euphoria of victory in war.  The  third is his own conviction that an artist's lived experience takes centrality in his/her art, and therefore an artist cannot distance him/herself from its' implications/ responsibility which makes art political as much as it is cultural and intensely personal. With this position on art, he makes it impossible for art to be simply amnesiac.  In Weerasinghe's own words, “the bleeding heart at the centre of the painting is important to my story, even though it is at odds with its modernist construction” (Bandaranayake, 1992).

Weerasinghe's most socio-politically engaging and art historically significant interventionist exhibitions have been Kansawa and Yantra Gala and Round Pilgrimage. In his exhibition Kansawa, Weerasinghe put forward an uncomfortable narration of an unwilling participant in social chaos who became such due to his inability to intervene in the assault that took place in July 1983 that scarred the memories of many Tamils.  The works in the exhibition and other paintings done during during early 1990s emphasized the guilt of a society and its/his cathartic need for abreaction.  A large number of paintings with imagery that symbolically as well as directly indicated the fragmentation of society depicted burnings, distorted human figures, images of photos reminiscent of a scattered family album in a burning house, all denoting pain and loss. The 'Long Necked Man', a distorted human figure that recur in most of his paintings throughout 1990s in various contorted positions (in poses of pleading, defending, and sprawled on the floor) projects a dual roles in the overall context of the exhibition: one is that of the artist grappling with the pain of his own guilt and the other is the role of the victims of 1983 riots grappling with the pain of their own predicament. While this duality opens up the problematic of equating both pains at one level ignoring their specificities, it reveals the unrepentant silence of the perpetrating society and its unacknowledged responsibility for the violations inflicted, and the absence of an apology for its failure to protect its own citizens. Kansawa is Weerasinghe's lonely effort at doing exactly what Sri Lanka as a nation has miserably failed to do.   In this exhibition, the images of broken stupas and burning edifices of temples do not refer to archeological remains showing the desecration of religion, but rather the religion's desecration of  the  psyche of the society, and the betrayal of its core principle of non-violence. Kansawa also registers Weerasinghe's initial grouses with the contemporary manifestations of institutionalized and politicized Buddhism and its links to the dangerous lineage of ethno chauvinism in the discourse of nationalism.

If Kansawa is a manifestation of the disgust of racism triumphing over humanity, his exhibition Yantra Gala and the Round Pilgrimage (1997) revealed the pathology of a nation and its amnesiac status.  Here, more than in Kansawa, Weerasinghe directly questions the nature of 'comforts' one can gain from a paralytic nation amidst the presumably glorious Buddhist ethics seemingly non effective in the case of political violence in Sri Lanka. The exhibition included a series of paintings depicting a lonely mother going from one camp to another in search of her disappeared son, which Weerasinghe equates to Atamasthana Wandanawa, the pilgrimage undertaken by devout Buddhists centered upon worshipping eight crucial religious sites designated as important and meritorious in the ritual calendar. The main installation consisted of a 'centre stone' which is usually enshrined within the pagodas in Buddhist temples containing 'holy material'.  This was laid on a bed of unhusked rice scattered on the floor in an enclosure with the aforementioned paintings on the surrounding walls depicting the lonely mother in her search.  A flock of terracotta parrots were placed on the rice, and broken statuettes of the Buddha were placed on the centre stone. The rice scattered on the floor was mingled with pieces of paper with place names of well-known torture camps. The idea of arranging the installation in this manner was to make the viewer to go around the center stone reading the paintings closely. In this manner, the viewer also symbolically makes the pilgrimage/the mother's journey to the camps. Through this process, the viewer becomes an active participant in the ritual related to the artwork.  The parrots symbolically referred to the passive and easily pacified non effective middleclass, which Weerasinghe emphasized were burdened with a 'peasant mentality'.1  My view of his work written in 1997 still stands:  “his tough aesthetics resurrect obscure images which acknowledges the violent legacy of our immediate past, and its aftermath without being evasive, and gives no consolation to the convenient amnesiac. His art constantly reminds us that contrary to the 'modernist' aloofness from (socio-political) life, art can deal with such monumental calamities, and that inconvenient and unpleasant truths can, and should be interrogated” (Perera 1997). While the exhibition's enormous socio-political and art historical relevance remains solid, it nevertheless offers some of its key assumptions for critique. With reference to his narrative within the paintings, the obvious choice of a mother going in search for the lost son reinstates the society's genderizing of  sons as the defenders of citizens' rights and political will,  and mothers as the grievers and bearers of its pain. The fathers and sons as grievers and mothers and daughters as victims of violent death and disappearances somehow do not find adequate acknowledgement or consideration in Weerasinghe's work at aesthetic or conceptual levels. 

His next major art project that had strong socio-political relevance is the 'Shrine of the Innocents', a monument built in Sri Jayawardenapura in close proximity to Sri Lanka's Parliament in memory of 38 school children from Ambilipitiya who disappeared while in Army custody during the youth uprising in the period 1988-1991. This period rapidly transformed southern Sri Lanka into a killing field. Although it is a highly politicized and politically motivated assignment2 which is different to Weerasinghe's other artistic endeavors, the 'Shrine of the Innocents' was probably the most elaborate expression of Weerasinghe's own attempts at dealing with his grief of seeing extensive violations inflicted on youth, and the guilt of being part of a society that watched the unfolding violence in silence. It is also perhaps the closest he has come to most explicitly positioning the duality of his role: one that aligns his own pain with that of the victims of political violence and the other being part of the society which produced the perpetrators. The entire design of the monument and all of its associated elements point to the profound bearings of pain, betrayal, guilt, search of redemption and justice, solace and the cathartic need to share the grief over lost lives and loss of innocence: “The tablets with the thoughts of parents represent the narratives of violence in the recent past.  At the opposite end, the flower altar as well as the coloring of the entire inner chamber is symbolic of the religious domain, where many people looked for solace when secular systems of justice and law and order failed. The clay objects on the white pedestals representing human heads are indicative of violent deaths. In other words, this ordering enmeshes violent death in between the religious domain and the narratives of violence…..while simultaneously creating a somber and meditative atmosphere which creates the kind of environment in which to remember those who were lost and to ponder about the wider consequences of that period of political violence” (Perera 2007).  For Weerasinghe, that moment of catharsis, the connectivity with the parents of the victims who disappeared and sharing in their collective grief was paramount in the whole process of building the monument: “In the process of hand-molding the clay objects strewn on the floor of the central chamber…..the parents as a collective did get a chance for a process that can be called 'public mourning'” (Perera 2007). While acknowledging the artist's attempt to bring in a sense of relief and recognition of pain and loss experienced by the victims' families and forcing the amnesiac society not to forget the 'horrors of its pathology', the monument was critiqued for its dislocation from the geographical location of pain (Ambilipitiya), and therefore distancing it from its immediate environment of memories and aggrieved community which in many ways assured its 'non-remembrance' in the long run. Because of its highly politicized engagement with the power regime at the time, it was also critiqued for allegedly exploiting the personal pain of victims' families for political mileage.

Weerasinghe's engagement with art became self absorptive in the following few years since his exhibition Private Stuff in 1998 held at the Heritage Gallery. Not totally moving away from socio-political inquiry within his art, Weerasinghe engages with his own sexual anxieties, uncertainties and his own masculine identity. His works Portrait of an Artist as a Divine Being, (2001-2002), Confused Narrative: That's the Way Life Is (2003) and (My) Inability of Painting Woman (2000) bring into discussion politics and issues of (his) masculinity. His works bring us close to the discussions on sexuality and the workings of sexuality through which gender identities are formed. To read his art of this period it is useful to understand the ideas of 'homophobia' discussed within gender studies and psychoanalysis.  Linked to the unresolved sexual desires of the male child in the great oedipal process3 in the Freudian model, the homoerotic desire is seen as a feminine desire for other men where homophobia is seen as an attempt to suppress it. Homophobia is defined as the male fear of not measuring up to other men in their masculine selves and therefore masculinity is a homosocial enactment where men constantly try to prove to other men their masculinity (Kimmel 1994: 128-133).   David Leverenze argues that “ideologies of manhood have functioned primarily in relation to the gaze of male peers and male authority” (Leverenze 1991). In his works mentioned above, Weerasinghe deconstructs the myth of masculinity by positioning himself as the object of attention and revealing on the one hand its homoerotism through his obsessive tracings of hard penised explicit male profiles. On the other hand, by this very act of exploring homoeroticism, he undermines the typical homosocial behavior and procedure of the male in order to re-emphasize his masculinity. In other words, he presents a compromised masculinity that explores homoerotics in it as opposed to suppressing it and thereby highlighting its contradictions. The series of works included in the exhibitions (My) Inability of Painting Woman (2000) and Your Hair My Eye (2003) shows Weerasinghe's attempts at resolving his predicament in relation to women and femininity. The female figures with unyielding and unruly hair (symbolically referring to the liberated/independent woman) are depicted imprisoned within an arrangement of pieces of fabric conventionally worn by home-making women. It also indicates the dilemma and anxieties of the contemporary (masculine) man who is posited between idealized roles of the conventional woman and ideologically liberalized male perceptions of the 'modern' woman.  Both  (My) Inability of Painting Woman and Your Hair My Eye  deals with the male anxieties in relation to perceiving and  understanding women in their assigned roles that fluctuates within traditional, modern and  contemporary gender boundaries.  However, both these exhibitions can be critiqued for not questioning the typical male construct of 'women as a mystery' or successfully rejecting the conventional profiling of women, but rather falling into the same trap one way or another by merely replacing it with the 'male inability to understand' (women).   

In his latter attempts at investigating homoeroticism, Weerasinghe links the notions of homophobia to the pathologic violence manifested in the society in a multitude of ways such as gender biases and suppression, ethno chauvinism, racism, religious fundamentalism, sexism, and machoism. He sees this state of affairs as an attempt at re-emphasizing the masculine power of the phallus. In Weerasinghe's art, the act of suppressing homoeroticism, the 'feminine' within the male, is equated with the suppression of the 'other' who is perceived as a threat to domination. His latter series of works, Celestial Underwear,  Dance of Shiva, Celestial Violence, Mics and Snakes chronologically develops the idea of political power  as masculine power which resides within the state as well as religious bodies, political lobby groups, media institutions among others that support hegemonic discourses. This homosocial act of re-emphasizing  masculinity manifests as  an immensely destructive oppressive macho power. It is within this formula that Weerasinghe explores the power and domination which manifests in the Sri Lankan socio-political landscape in his current works Celestial Violence and Celestial Fervor. He looks at the combined efforts of institutionalized Buddhism's and  extreme Sinhala nationalists' larger plan for dominance which has been articulated throughout  Sri Lanka's recent history to the masses through mass media where violence, destruction and desecration of  humanity is justified, glorified and hero-fied as 'just acts' that are necessary for the good of the country. It is worth mentioning here that homophobia is known to be closely linked to racism and sexism, and works on fear and intimidation. Focusing on Weerasinghe's work, Man with Knife and Kitchen Knives: Weapons of Mass Destruction, a reading can be undertaken on the use of the knife. The knife, an object of everyday life in the kitchen that can be turned into a handy weapon of violence forces us to rethink the lethality of everyday taken for granted aspects of society when politically mobilized.  The public engagements of religions (in this case politicized Buddhism) and instruments of mass media (symbolized by microphones and light boxes in Weerasinghe's work) helps to publicize the politicized rhetoric which claims superiority and offers justifications for domination. Weerasinghe uses the color 'saffron/yellow' as a reference for virulent forms of political Buddhism, a theme which he continues from his earlier work Amnesiac Wall and Yellow Axes, an installation done in 2004 on the same theme of problematic manifestations of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Offering a reading on Man with Knife (a work included in Celestial Fervor) Ismail writes: “The brilliance of Man with Knife lies in it bringing together, associating, everyday violence, mass communication and (Sinhala) masculinity, not simply with Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalism, but one of its holiest, carnivalesque, symbols, Wesak; with Wesak's most public, iconic metonym, the pandal. To Buddhism, Gautama was born, attained nirvana and died on that poya. Buddhist Sri Lankans, of course, commemorate that day with, among other things, pandals. By mimicking them, this text asks its reader, at one level, to consider the relation between what might appear to be innocent, celebratory, apolitical Buddhism and politics, ideology. For the pandal, depicting scenes from Jataka stories, episodes in the life of Gautama, “communicates” with the masses, interpellates subjects: publicly, literally on the street. In so doing, it could be compared with the microphone at a political rally; though it works, primarily, on the unconscious … Weerasinghe could have painted these images on canvas and made an effective, if straightforward, political statement about, intervention within, our present. By mimicking the form of the pandal, he connects this work with the iconic art form of Wesak, protests the politicization of Buddhism in Sri Lanka, its violent treatment of the other, through both form and content” (Ismail 2009). The majority of works included in Celestial Fervor uses these light box installations reminiscent of kitsch light box advertisements akin to the ones seen in local gambling places with the image of an illuminated horse galloping to the flicker of lights. They also remind us of the illuminated religious contraptions in Buddhist festivals from pandals to lanterns (as Ismail points out). In the works titled Kitchen Knife & Ligers and Soldiers in Clouds, instead of the flickering horse, one could find flickering figures of soldiers with guns and Ligers (a creature containing combined features of the lion and the tiger) bearing their teeth alongside knifes moving inside the light boxes creating a beautiful, disco lighted atmosphere. In addition to these, a bisected barrel is made transparent and suspended above ground. Similarly, a transparent balustrade aptly titled Soaring Balustrade is hung above ground and illuminated to heighten the allure.  Elements within these works have a sense of de-contextualization and are conspicuously festive and celebratory. Their allure acts as a veneer to cover the underlying potentialities of violence professed through politics, religion and mass culture. In this exhibition, through the metaphor of the 'Celestial Fervor', the artist continuously nudges us to critically review our own anesthetized, duped perceptions and unhesitant consumption of ideology and actions that are shrouded in overused rhetoric linked to concepts such as nationalism, patriotism, authenticity, cultural purity and religiosity.

In Celestial Fervor too Weerasinghe continues his trope of using elements from popular culture, art and archeology combining them with his socio-politically heavy conceptualizations, which makes the artwork layered and provides a broader canvas for viewers to connect and ponder in depth.  His imagery, although sometimes seemingly direct are imbued with irony, mimicry, metaphors and interpretations that problematizes the most seemingly innocent, taken for granted aspects of life, society and ideology. The use of light boxes, illuminations, cutout male figures and using of knifes and wax are all undertaken consciously to make meaning not only in the way they are used but also in the choice of using such material itself. This way, his art intervenes critically again not only in the realm of politics and ideology but in the art historical discourse as well.

Notes:

1.Jagath Weerasinghe, 1997. Here his use of 'peasant mentality' refers not to people engaged in agriculture but to the middle class intelligentsia, the professionals and the politicians who enjoy the privileges of democracy and protection of its laws but are imprisoned in their thinking due to the parochialism of their ideology and lack of innovation in their practices.

2.The 'Shrine of the Innocents' was sponsored by President Chandrika Kumaratunge's government. The coordination of the construction of the monument was done by the highly politicized program Sudu Nelum Movement, State Engineering Corporation and Urban Development Authority.

3.  The Freudian Psychoanalysis assumes that during the process leading to the Oedipal split a male child who first identifies himself with the mother sees the father through the eyes of the mother in the initial stages. This allows him to desire the father as the mother does.  With the Oedipal split he starts identifying with father leaving the first desire for the masculine figure unresolved.

Bibliography

Ismail, Qadri  (2009). 'Reading the Art of Jagath Weerasinghe', exhibition catalog of 'Celestial Fervor'. Pita Kotte: Theertha Red Dot Gallery.

Kimmel, Michael S (1994). 'Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity'. In, Theorizing Masculinities, eds., Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman.  Thousand Oaks : Sage.

Leverenze, D (1991). 'The Last Real Man in America: From Natty Bumppo to Batman.' In, American Literary Review, 3.

Perera, Anoli  (1997). 'A Socio-Political Reading of Yantra Gala'. In, Sunday Observer, 5th October 1997. Colombo: Lake House.

Perera, Sasanka. (2007). 'Public Space and Monuments: Politics of Sanctioned and Contested Memory'. In, South Asia Journal for Culture, Vol. I, Pitakotte: Colombo Institute/Theertha.

Bandaranayake, Senaka  (1992). 'Thinking Mind and Bleeding Heart.' In, Sunday Observer, November 22, 1992. Colombo: Lake House.

Weerasinghe,  Jagath (1997). Yantra Gala and Round Pilgrimage, concept note of the exhibition (in Sinhala), Colombo: Heritage Gallery.