Like any other intellectual practice, art can reinforce the status quo, resist it, or do both simultaneously. For example, take this country’s most celebrated – and overrated – modern painter, George Keyt. Turning to the ancient Sri Lankan and Indian traditions for inspiration gave his work, in the context of the early 1940s, its distinctive signature and an anti-colonial dimension. (The colonial art establishment favored western-style realism.) However, in turning only to the Sinhala and Hindu traditions, in dismissing the Tamil and Mughal, his work effectively reinforces majoritarian nationalism.

 With regard to women, Keyt painted them as objects: they are usually depicted naked, in sexual situations, associated with nature or the home, not as subjects or in the public sphere. Thus his work strongly reinforces heterosexual patriarchy.

 But, an aesthete might respond, art is about beauty and feeling, not politics; and Keyt’s paintings are beautiful. Indeed they are. Though it bears repeating that they were not considered so by the aesthetic establishment of his time. Keyt and the ’43 Group changed our taste, our understanding of beauty. Still, that does not mean that their production has no politics in the broad sense. Every picture – even the most decorative or abstract – makes a statement about society, politics.

 Since the ’43 Group, as Jagath Weerasinghe argues, there have been outstanding individual talents, but no generation of Sri Lankan painters who have intervened collectively in their artistic and socio-political present. Until what Weerasinghe has termed, somewhat unfortunately, the “90s trend.” (“Trend” suggests transience; the word is commonly associated with fashion.)

 Anything but fashionable, this group of painters has confronted its present – courageously, responsibly, often with extraordinary compositions. Chandraguptha Thenuwara’s work with barrels being an excellent instance. Angered by the relentless war against the Tamils, the atrocities against subaltern Sinhalese in the late 1980s, opposed to an increasingly brutal, dictatorial Sinhala nationalist state and its religio-militaristic ideology; opposed, also, to the boring aestheticism of our art establishment, these painters, sculptors and installationists have taken our art away from a preoccupation with the private (love, etc), with beauty. (However, given that the only thing one knows about the future is that one cannot know it, their art, like that of the ’43 Group, may also come to be considered beautiful some day.)

Organized through collectives like Theertha and Vibhavi, these artists understand their role as going beyond individual production, exhibition and commercial success. Acting on their anti-elitism, they’ve taken their art outside Colombo, to the street, the village, even the carriages of trains, made sustained efforts to enhance public access to art in exhibitions, workshops and classrooms across the country. Or, rather, across the south. For, despite their politics, they have largely ignored the northeast.

 Now, four of the best of them have taken this collective spirit a step further, engaged in a “one year drawing project” and produced a book. We learn from its back jacket that: “In May 2005, Muhanned Cader, Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, Chandraguptha Thenuwara and Jagath Weerasinghe each created a drawing. The artists then posted their drawings to one other artist in the group, who created a new drawing in response to the one they received. So marked the start” of the project.

 Unlikely. It strains credulity to be told that these four decided spontaneously to mail drawings to each other and hope for a response. Someone had to have organized them, if not conceived the project itself. That someone is the book’s editor/publisher, Sharmini Pereira, who should take more credit for putting together this timely, artistically vital, intellectually provocative, exquisitely produced volume. It would have, though, benefitted hugely from an introduction by her explaining the project’s genesis, purpose, selection of painters, etc.
 For, the questions arise: Why these four and not others? Does their selection imply that Cader, Shanaathanan, Thenuwara and Weerasinghe are this country’s leading contemporary artists? Leading political artists? Are we supposed to think it just a coincidence that the group is ethnically mixed, consisting of one Muslim, one Tamil – and two Sinhalese? Why does there always have to be more Sinhalese!

Why is the group all male? Surely it cannot be implied, leave alone held, that we lack good women painters! I am not advocating inclusion for its own sake. Nelun Harassgama would have made a fascinating choice, formally and politically. Her work blurs the distinction between public and private, calling attention to what is repressed – women’s labor, if not exploitation – by the very distinction. If that couldn’t be done because her work isn’t considered of the caliber equal to the big boys, then the question must be posed: what are these four painters doing canonizing themselves?

One cannot avoid judgments of quality, whether in art or anywhere else in life. The point, though, is that canonization, while unavoidable, is a mechanism of power. You should not oppose power, as such, consciously, on political grounds, as these painters do, and seek it at the same time, if unconsciously, on artistic grounds. A good introduction would have addressed these and other questions, which have no easy answers. For no project could be completely inclusive. Selection is inevitable. Indeed, as Shanaathanan pointed out in conversation, every artist, however oppositional, is complicit with the elitist history of the discipline. But there’s a significant difference between acknowledging complicity and desiring canonization. A project such as this should have addressed its exclusivity and purpose. Now it appears like an exhibition without a catalogue.

 That lacuna is compounded by the book’s only writing – a “timeline,” authored by Weerasinghe, Thenuwara, Shanaathanan and Mariah Lookman (a Pakistani painter, Cader’s wife); Pereira, apparently, did not contribute. Added almost as an afterthought, in a pocket in the back jacket, it “recalls the background of events against which this project unfolded.” These events include, understandably, political developments in Sri Lanka and abroad, including the U.S. invasion of Iraq; but also, inexplicably, Venus Williams’s triumph in Wimbledon, the death of ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin and Richard Branson’s spaceship. None of the 208 drawings refer to any of these things. More significantly, the timeline fails to consider that the “background” (if that’s the right term) of this book is not just events from May 2005 to October 2007, but at least the entire postcolonial history of Sri Lanka.

 To trivialize things further, the timeline also informs us when Thenuwara visited relatives in Bangalore, Weerasinghe sojourned in Stockholm and Cader travelled to the Thal desert. (Shanaathanan spares us boastful biographical details.) More indefensible is their habit of plugging the work of their own friends. Five books published by those hyper-commercialized propagators of pulp, Perera and Hussain, are included. Also mentioned is the lavishly produced, utterly orientalist coffee table book, Sri Lankan Style, by Dominic Sansoni and Channa Daswatte. Such side support is comparable to Michael Ondaatje boosting the likes of Senake Senanayake, Marie Alles Fernando and Druvinka!
Criticism aside, this is a book of drawings – and the drawings, at their best, are truly superb. They may not all leap out of the page and say, frame me. But, then, they cannot be seen as unique images. To be properly grasped, they must be read as responses to, in their engagement with, each other. Not individually, but collectively, as each others’ accomplices.

The first drawing is an abstract image by Cader, the project’s dominant formal presence. The product of much thought, its three distinct elements, different in size, shape, shading and color, suggest that, however abstract, it is a mediation on the relation between three different objects. What the objects represent is open to interpretation. To a reader like myself, the things are Tamil, Muslim, Sinhala. Let me make it clear: I am not saying, definitively, that this drawing is about ethnic relations in Sri Lanka. To repeat: it is “about,” or stages the relation between, three objects. To an aesthete, it could be an representation of a purely formal relation. To a philosopher, a mediation on the question of form. For all I know, to a vegetarian it could represent the oppression of vegetables (the small shape in the middle, twisted like some brinjals get, sandwiched between meat and fish). To me, their reference is clear, especially given the specific detail of this particular drawing.

The top shape is medium grey, thin and long, getting thinner towards the top, with a peninsula-ish form at its northernmost end. The bottom shape, in black, gets bulkier towards the south. The light grey shape in the middle is the thinnest, least substantial, minor. But also, being the lightest color, the most innocent. For this drawing plays with black and white, what those colors signify. The darkest shape is the bottom, the south. The northern object, being grey, is a mixture of dark and innocence. 

Think this figure has nothing to do with our political geography? Think again!

That’s the point: these drawings make you think. This project takes its reader seriously, desires engagement, compels her to be its accomplice. 

Indeed, if you think about Cader’s drawing, you might even be convinced that this seemingly small, insignificant image is actually quite complex, a remarkable pictorial summation of the current state of our ethnic relations.

The second image, Thenuwara’s response to Cader, a design, is unexpected. It makes no reference to what has come before. It says: despite what you have done, I’ll draw my own thing. Shanaathanan, however, following Thenuwara, reworks that design, and supplements it with something of his own, feet. The biggest foot contains two smaller feet inside it. Another mediation on the relation between three objects, but differently. Where Cader had two big and one small object, Shanaathanan has one big, or major, and two small, minor (with a partial outline of another foot, a fourth object, on the right edge). Shanaathanan’s drawing is a singular response to Thenuwara and Cader: repeats it, engages with it and brings something else into play. It says: I take what you have drawn, what you say, seriously. Now please attend to my concerns: coming from the north, I cannot avoid questions of size, of major and minor (domination is a theme that recurs in his drawings); I must think about feet, mobility, restraint; the (dismembered) body imposes itself on me. If Cader is the project’s dominant formal presence, Shanaathanan dominates thematically.

Weerasinghe extends Shanaathanan, draws a head-smudged male body in addition to the feet. This body, though, is twisted, constrained, immobile, unfree. It is restrained – like the country from 2005, under the Rajapakses. In Weerasinghe’s first drawing, coming as it does after Cader and Shanaathanan, the concerns of this artistic exchange take shape.

Cader’s next image captures them with truly stunning brilliance. In response to both Shanaathanan and Weerasinghe, he adds feet (and hands) to his first abstract image – thus demonstrating its formal and conceptual flexibility. (Cader works with this figure consistently throughout the series, giving his responses, uniquely in the collection, a pictorial continuity. In other drawings, it takes the form of a snake, a tree, a foot, even a quill.) In keeping with the developing theme of restraint, he binds the figure in strips. What was previously three shapes becomes, in response to the images of his accomplices, one object, tightly bound. It might have feet, but cannot move.
Thenuwara’s second image responds to Cader and the others. It takes the tightly wound strips and opens them out, cautiously. Plays with the themes of restraint and mobility…

It isn’t possible, in the short space of a review, to comment on most of the drawings, or the themes. Some are personal, poignant; others funny. But politics, inevitably, dominates. Readers might want, for instance, to look out for the appearance of a certain shawl!
The collection, as is only to be expected, is uneven. Indeed, a good editor would have resisted the temptation to publish every single drawing. Collectively, though, they insistently, intelligently address the Sri Lankan present, the war, with Shanaathanan and Weerasinghe, especially, foregrounding both its imprint on the male body and that body’s complicity with violence. (Another reason a thoughtful feminist artistic engagement with this exchange is imperative. The female form is depicted in just four of the paintings. This in a context that has seen rape as a tactic of war, not to mention the woman’s body itself deployed as an explosive weapon. Though, of course, the question of women and war cannot be reduced to that of the body.)

The challenging, lasting accomplishment of these four accomplices is not just to draw thoughtful responses to our dispiriting present, some of which could be torn from the book and framed, but to engage with each other. To attend to what has been said to them, pictorially, and to ask for attention, consideration, in return. To say, in response to the other: yes, what you picture is important, I should take account of it; but I will do it my way. I will compliment you by adding to your drawing. Or, sometimes: no, I disagree; you might want to think of this instead. The point being not to agree, but engage. To work together, without necessarily seeking consensus. To defer to the other, not seek to dismiss or dominate her.

That is a practice our country – people, politicians, intellectuals, institutions – should have engaged in at least from 1948. But Sinhala nationalism, and then the Tamil, sought domination, uniformity, assent rather than engagement. If this book protests that colossally tragic collective failure, it also reminds its reader, its accomplice – you – that the future, precisely because it cannot be known, has not been written, drawn, fixed. That nationalism, while it may dominate our present, need not script our future as well.
That is to say, art, like any other intellectual practice, can reinforce the status quo, resist it or, as Cader, Shanaathanan, Thenuwara and Weerasinghe teach us, sometimes even refigure it.