Atul Dodiya. Meditation (with open eyes). Mixed media installation with 9 wooden cabinets. Overall size: 39’ 2” x 8’ 10” x 9” (Height variable – Maximum: 8’ 10”). 2011.

CHILD’S PLAY

Bako and Bapu have spirited conversations in Atul Dodiya’s new works. Abhay Sardesai eavesdrops.

Atul Dodiya goes back to school.

Mounting twelve blackboard-like canvases on wooden stands and on the walls, and assembling an array of nine packed cabinets, he ushers a classroom into the spanking white environs of the Chemould Prescott Road gallery, Mumbai, from the 10^th of September to the 20^th of October, 2011.

Bako Exists. Imagine is a journey into the artist’s past but also an inspired sojourn in a fantasy world: Dodiya re-imagines a space created by the avant-garde Gujarati poet Labhshanker Thaker, known for his self-reflexive experiments with the written and spoken word. In Thaker’s work of fiction, Bako Chhe, Kalpo, the alert, maladjusted pre-teen Bako meets the Mahatma in his dream even as the Mahatma greets him in his. Dodiya is one of the few artists in India who have drawn prodigiously from the world of literature. In his Antler Anthology (2003-04), for instance, Dodiya has responded with passionate flamboyance to the exceptional works of Gujarati poets like Sitanshu Yashaschandra and Kamal Vora, among others.

In Bako Exists. Imagine, Dodiya covers his canvases with anecdotes culled from Thaker’s text in lines that skilfully approximate the lefthanded scrawl of a child. The sentences dip and rise and sometimes, keel over, as they summon up incident after incident on the layered grey surface of the canvas sprinkled with marble dust. At a distance, the wall-mounted mini-cupboards hold an assortment of delights – there are photographs (from a sneering Muhammad Ali and a composed Geeta Dutt to Pablo Picasso’s predatory eye), found objects (from bleached bones, broken slates and coconut scrapers to a devilishly green Incredible Hulk toy and a somnolently benign Vishnu figurine), quotations (from Jasper Johns to a Dada Bulletin) and sculptures (from peeing mannequins to milk measures) populating Dodiya’s mini-museum of memories.

The relationship between Bapu and Bako develops over heartwarming encounters – these are conversations between equals across the age divide. Gandhi plays the indulgent interlocutor to the precocious Bako; playfully mischievous and contemplative in turns, Gandhi gets transformed from being the father of the nation to being the grandfather next door. He mewls like a baby, steps out of a calendar to hand Bako a whistle, and informs him that there are no report cards or exams in zzzland. Bako’s questions and responses come across as naïve and naughty but they often cut into hypocrisy and false piety with a serrated knife: “They keep printing you on currency notes…And fake ones too”, he says during a chat. There is unexpected poetry as well: “Then Bapu and I rubbed out the boundary between our slumberlands with an eraser.”

The ghost of Gandhi has stalked Dodiya’s studio in Ghatkopar for more than a decade. His suite of watercolours in 1999 was titled An Artist of Non-Violence and showed the Mahatma in settings and situations that were alternately epochal and quotidian. In fact, one is reminded of the connotatively rich Morning Walk on Juhu Beach (1998), where a small garish image featuring the fable of the monkey judge cheating two warring cats is embedded in a large upturned image of Gandhi being led by a little boy who is holding on to his staff with great confidence. Is this one of Bako’s first appearances, you wonder?

As the paintings rely mainly on the relationship between text and image, they hope to put a spin on narrative that is halfway between what you get in a graphic novel and a children’s comic book. To Dodiya’s credit, the illustrational impulse is reined in with an impressive painterly intelligence. However, the chunkiness of the text seems to relegate the faceless model-like figures basking in the shade of the palm fronds, busy with a book or a football, balancing Brancusi’s column and striking poses next to exquisite botanical specimens, to marginal positions; these diminutive figures also seem to enact their roles with a sleepwalker’s enthusiasm, which is identically languorous.

Moreover, the episodic nature of the works does not often allow the conversations to be presented in inventively reimagined formats, a feature one has come to expect of the continuously resourceful Dodiya. The act of revealing a shared world of dreams makes it possible to eavesdrop on banter that is at once private and public. If Dodiya hopes to be strategically low-key to bring alive the forbidding ennui that pervades classrooms, he succeeds. However, he achieves this by choosing not to summon up the colour and chaos that also mark school spaces. Unfortunately, the contained anarchy of the hoard inside the cabinets does not quite enter into an attractively uneasy equation with the serenely plotted paintings. The paintings and the cabinets come across as two distinct worlds, almost antiseptic in their affections for each other.

All said and done, however, a Dodiya show enriches you with its wit, scope and circuit of associations in unexpected ways. Even as he explores childhood, its contents and discontents, with feeling and acuity, Dodiya allows Bako to open a window into the fractured conscience of a nation that increasingly looks like it is being led by politicians who have graduated from a school for scoundrels.