Present Encounters : Papers from the conference of the Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane, 1996

it . . . The reputed degree of sanctity attributed to famous images of this kind does seem to correspond to the degree of their amorphousness and lack of resemblance to anything but themselves, their mysterious otherness - a startling au ra of bathos and of the utterly new. Crude as these murti or images often are, they exert a compelling fascination on the minds of pilgrims. This is based on an intuitive knowledge of how certain very stri king shapes can - violently or subtly - mod ify the worshipper's state of mind. Modern abstract sculpture has begun to re-discover this knowledge. 'My idea of the sacred is not rooted i n any specific culture', Mukherjee affirms. 'To me it is a feeling that I may get in a church , mosque, temple or forest. The countryside is filled with places where divinity dwells . . . It is often a sense of space , scale or presence that g ives me a sacred feel i ng , and this could be anywhere in the world . My inspiration and visual stimuli · come all over the world , from museum objects and artefacts, and more immediately, from my environment'. Learning as much from I ndian art's partiality to a vol uptuous iconographic excess (from high temple scu lpture to wayside shrines) as from the abbreviated iconicity of modernist forms, the variety of 'sources' have been drawn into her sculpture's pantheistic (and pan-erotic) embrace. When Mrinalini Mukherjee speaks of the equation with awe and reverence that a traditional invocatory deity inspires in her spectator, she is evoking a kind of aura, a presence, an invisible threshold of immanence. This quality is also manifest in the work of another sculptor, N. N. Rimzon . The sense of phenomenological containment and spiritual equ ipoise conveyed by his nude figu res is the more stri king for the circle - charmed , but also fai ntly menacing - in which they are held. The i nvisible threshold of immanence suggests degrees of proximity to, and distance from the image. But then , it is in nearly analogous terms that Walter Benjamin described his notion of the 'aura': 'A strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close the object may be'. The reference to Benjamin also a llows us to return to the title of th is paper, 'profane illumi nations' , but this time i nflecting it with Benjami n's crucial formulation: 'the true, creative overcoming of rel ig ious illumi nation . . . resides i n a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological i nspiration . . . ' The agon istic tension in Benjamin's thought between the theological and the surrealist/Marxist makes h im particularly relevant to our topic. Final ly, profane illumi nation must become, as it was for Benjami n , a mode of radical awakening - of spirit, but also of other, more materialist forms of consciousness. • Walter Benjamin, 'Surrealism' and 'A Small History of Photography' in One-Way Street and Other Writings, London, 1 979. • Glossary of Sanskrit and Tibetan Terms appended in T. S. Maxwell, 'Lakhmandal and Trilokinath: The Transformed Functions of Hindu Architecture in Two Cross-Cultural Zones of the Western Himalayas' in Art International, September-October, 1 980. • Richard Lannoy, The Speakjng Tree: A Study of Indian Culture and Society, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1 97 1 . • Mrinalini Mukherjee, Sculpture, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford , 1 994. 84