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Extract from a long essay by Jacques Rangasamy in 'BEYOND
FRONTIERS'
"Back in England, Dhanjal's sculptures first
came to major critical attention in the Hayward Gallery's telling
of "The Other Story" (Hayward Gallery, 1g89). Stitched
snugly in the shows' wider critical and social-political fabric,
Dhanjal’s contribution nevertheless stood out for certain
universal sculptural qualities that took his work beyond their immediate
context and ideals under exploration. His display consisted mainly
of blocks of fresh slate broken from the earth's crust, with the
barest human intervention. Their fractured surfaces were fitted
with little niches for wax candles, configured in neat geometric
order. The blocks come to sculptural life, magically, only when
the candles were lit. It invited the ritual participation of the
viewer, and gave the work a functional identity reminiscent of that
of some tribal fetish sculptures. The work invoked a fundamental,
if often overlooked, aesthetic principle of Indian Statuary according
to which vision operates as the projection of an ordering cognitive
intelligence, rather than the passive reception of impression generally
favoured by the west. This is attested by the shaping of the human
eyebrows into bows in Indian devotional statuary, an iconographic
prescription that likens vision to a darting arrow. More than the
residuary of creative operations, Dhanjal's work become repositories
of energetic ideas that constellate into a magnetic field, with
creator and viewer at the respective poles, and through which the
aesthetic transaction takes place.
Such a style of creative engagement is inspired
by traditional Indian sculpture but the dialect of his forms remains
attuned to western) sensibilities. The ritual dimension carefully
prepares the receptive attitude to his work. The constellation of
lights in the slate blocks, like twinkling stars in the vault of
a night sky, induces a contemplative disposition during which time
mutates from tyrannical measure of duration that into the rich stillness
that contains all things and all processes. Silence plays an equivalent
role in Indian music. Indeed, silence is the primary musical element
rather than sound-denying void. It is the very matrix in which all
sounds gestate and issue, supplying the Soul sphere with a perfect
metaphor. A Raga is introduced by a period of silence devoted to
adjusting the silence within with the prevailing silence without.
When the player plucks the strings of his sitar, he sculpts the
silence into musical narratives and poetry, in the way a sculptor
cuts into a relief. Like the involuted ground of the stone slab,
silence, to which listeners and performers remain attuned between
the musical notes throughout the performance, acts as the binding
medium for the whole Raga. The stillness of Time and the all-inclusiveness
of Silence has for equivalent in the visual realm, Light all pervasive.
Its modulation into the spectrum gives shades, hues and forms to
the world. Light is the fundamental medium for Sculpture. To borrow
a metaphor from dancing, the choreography of Light and shade across
the sculptured surface infuses meaning into forms, stone, wood or
terracotta merely provides the supporting rhythm and music.
By incorporating stone with light, by reconciling
the densest with the most numinous of matter, Dhanjal enacted an
important principle of Indian Sculpture and Philosophy. Indeed,
the forces of life are not polarised between righteousness and evil,
but become manifest through the intervening modulation of feelings,
in the way the sentient world is woven from the thousand shades
of grey spawned by light and darkness. The synthesis Dhanjal achieved
contradicts the polarisation of values in modernist culture into
theses and antitheses, mind and body, black and white, male and
female, north and south, polarisation that fuel exploitative systems.
Conjugating matter with light in the same expressive effort evened
out the weight of values with which these respective elements are
traditionally invested.
The ritual participation of the viewer in actualising
the idea from its sculptural kernel was used to moving effect in
the "event" he created in San Paolo, Brazil, in 1991,
to mobilise popular conscience around the plight of the legions
of homeless and mendicant children, the fall out from wreaked marriages
and volatile relationships for which Brazil holds a dubious record.
These children are considered as vermin to tourism and preyed upon
by odious death squads. Dhanjal lit 5,000 candles and floated them
on surface of a small lake. Water and fire reconciled their traditional
antagonism for the occasion, and as the sprinkle of twinkling light
scattered across the surface of the lake, a flautist played. Participants
turned up in their hundreds, many wearing T-shirts with a printed
poem Dhanjal composed for the occasion."
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