The Second Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art exhibition catalogue (APT2)

As if in harmony with the vegetal realm from which her medium is drawn, the leading metaphor of Mrinalini Mukherjee's sculptures in hemp fibre comes from the organic life of plants. Improvising upon a motif or image that serves as her starting point, the work's gradual unfolding becomes analogous to the stirring into maturation of a sapling. The tough hand-dyed hemp fibres (the matt lushness of their hues recalling jungle flora) twisted and knotted around a fairly rudimentary metal armature are, as it were, roped into a logic of inexorable growth. Possessed of something of the heavy languor of tropical vegetation, the resulting forms are instinct with the luxuriance of proliferating root, unfurling leaf, burgeoning flower: the suggestive protrusions and openings are poised at the wondrous moment that precedes a dehiscence. In a slow upsurge from the ground, the frontality of coiled tumescence and swollen declivity betokens an exuberant implantation in the soil of the erotic: these totems are the avatars of an (abstracted) iconography of aroused sentience. Further, the un– abashed co-presence, rather than the oppositional polarity of female and male attributes within a single configuration, is the sign of an exceptional intuition: a potential collapse of sexual difference. This blurring of the boundaries brings to mind examples from a tradition that one would not instinctively associate with Mukherjee's sculpture: the inexhaustible carnal ambiguity of Giacometti's Suspended ball or the metaphor of 'round phallicism' evoked by Roland Barthes apropos of George Bataille's dark narrative of erotic transgression, The Story of the Eye. Where Mukherjee's work thematically diverges from the lineage inaugurated by the dissident surrealists is in its unfascination with the topos of defilement and death that held Bataille a life-long captive and which was elaborated by him in such texts as 'The Language of Flowers' or 'Kali', to cite only those titles which might appear to have a bearing on Mukherjee's concerns. Alert as she is to the forms of modernist primitivism, her immediate visual stimuli come from her own tradition, rich as it is in examples of a life-enhancing eros the more ecstatic for its metaphoric nexus with nature.What Richard Lannoy has to say of one of the principal traits of Indian art might also serve to describe the network of intuitive transpositions and 'tangential equivalences' (to borrow Mukherjee's expression) at play in her sculpture. All organic forms look as if they were derivatives of one primal substance, whether they represent vegetable, mineral, animal, or human shapes.Whole buildings seem to grow from the soil; their surfaces blossom with figures, beasts, and foliage, all of which are part of the same plantlike growth .. .This striking oneiric effect is obtained in very simple ways; surfaces are smooth and convex, figures cluster in sinuous stalk patterns, their bodies weaving in the poses of the dance, their arms like tendrils of creepers terminating in blossoming hands, fingers curled round the stem of lotus flowers. It is not just a matter of abundant detail carved in a single material-stone; there is a concerted attempt to express the unity of all life in formal terms. 1 The fusional aspect of Mukherjee's work, resulting from the happy promiscuity of art and craft, the masculine and the feminine, 'high' and 'low', inside and outside, ascension and descent, is imbricated in the very technique and choice of material. Miraculously malleable in her hands, the knotted texture becomes at once buoyant and cascading, flaccid and torsional. It also allows for daring symmetries and an ornamental elan, and for ingenious ways of negotiating volume and relief, scale and proportion, weight and counterpoise. The choice of a material traditionally associated with craft rather than 'high art' reflects Mukherjee's refusal, ever since she started using hemp fibre in the early 1970s, to accept a sterile prejudice in Western modernism, not least because of the continuing vitality of artisanal idioms in India, and in view of the integrated approach to art and craft that prevailed at the art school in Baroda where Mukherjee was a student. In the Indian context a reciprocity between idioms-playful or lofty- Lives and works in New Delhi, India VanShringar (Forest ornament) 1992 Hemp 142x135x77cm & 68x74 x53cm Collection:The artist is much less forced than, say, the 'rediscovery' of vernacular modes by artists in Europe and America from the late 1960s onwards (supports-surfaces, arte povera, post-minimalism). The vernacular in Mukherjee's work is one strand absorbed in a mesh generous enough to include a range of references-both indigenous and imported, the voluptuous iconographic excess of Indian art (from high temple sculpture to wayside shrines) and the abbreviated iconicity of modernist forms– that she has judged necessary in the elaboration of her imposing anthropomorphic totems. Indeed, the micro-unit of her language, the knot, might itself be taken as a metaphor not only of concatenation but also of the crease that her work has wrought in contemporary sculpture. Deepak Ananth,Lecturer inArt,Ecole desBeaux-Arts,Caen,France 1 Richard Lannoy, The Speaking Tree: AStudyof IndianCultureandSociety, Oxford University Press, Oxford,1971. ART I s T s: so UTH AND so UTH- EAST ASI A I 91