Editorial

This issue of ART news & views is based on sculpture, trying to bring into focus the current trends of sculpture in Indian contemporary art.
 
Whatever the medium, art to me. is the expression of the adventures and discoveries of the human organism reacting to the environment of the perpetual readjustment. Creativity, I believe, being an expression of freedom and originality, knows no boundaries except those inherent within itself. It claims no favourites among styles or "isms". To create is to select or invent elements significant to a given purpose, and organize them into a new and unique form. Creative process depends on a certain attitude of mind. It is an invitation to free thinking, exploration and progression. Its opposite is imitation that spells conformity, reaction and decadence.
 
I believe creativity is like a living organism. It germinates, evolves, grows to its full heights, and ends. What it leaves behind are the peaks of its developments that we call traditions or periods. There are many peaks of development of varying heights, in a people's cultural growth, as it is in the evolution of an individual artist. We consider these peaks as complete because every peak is complete when it has reached its zenith. Art, like peaks, does not admit of improvement; what it admits of is its growth.
 
Painting, sculpture and architecture are equal manifestations of a single aesthetic. Determined by the force of necessity, all three are locked together in a common structural frame work, measure and proportion, system of movement, sonority and echo. It is this homogeneity that has made the dream of achieving a synthesis of the three, almost as old as has been their isolation from each other.
 
We leant to overcome the "lack" of third dimensions in painting by the use of linear and atmospheric perspective and strove to give our depictions as natural a look as was possible. It was to be years before I was to be exposed to that new datum of space which instead of subscribing to the dictate of nature would reduce nature's role in the creative process to only as a point of departure. Better still I would learn to determine my own power of transformation by the distance I would achieve from nature.
 
By this new datum it would be the process of creation itself that was to create its own reality. The reality of this new architecture of painting was to be its existence. The proof of its creation was to be its being.
 
The space by this new datum, in the architecture of painting was to become as much an internal experience as it was an external object. It was to become indivisible from the human condition and man himself. It gave the artist a choice of either enlarging his self within the space or enlarging the space within himself.
 
Call it whatever you may; a victory of non-sense over sense, a triumph of dialectic over logic. That is what art means to me.

   SATISH GUJRAL