The Pleasures of the Road
Sarindar Dhaliwal is always on the move. If she's not installing a show in Britain, she's in residence in Port of Spain or New Delhi. Home in Toronto for a week or two, then visiting old friends in Kingston, Ontario, or Paris. One wonders what would happen if she stood still.
Yet Dhaliwal's travel is deeply productive. This is apparent in the cerebral installations and luminous, complex paintings that comprised her exhibition "Record Keeping," curated by Sunil Gupta for the Organisation for Visual Arts in London, England, and Jan Allen for its appearance at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston.
"I've always had a schizophrenic practice," Dhaliwal says, by which she means that the two streams of her work—paintings and installations—look like they're made by different people. But seeing 15 years of work together in "Record Keeping" reveals themes and connections; both express an ambivalent desire to escape the past, both unravel the past through personal stories and experiences and both take on and transform old wounds through travel and, ultimately, through colour.
The Punjabi Sheets installations confront family and cultural identity, but these works have as much to do with a child's encounter with authority as with the conventions of any particular culture. In Punjabi Sheets #2: Family Tree, Punjabi kinship terms are literally carved in stone—slabs of slate—with bowls of brilliant colour placed alongside. It is easy to imagine dislocation from family as a kind of loss, but distance from the strictures of kin can also be a liberation. As a child, Dhaliwal owned few toys, so she played with coloured pencils, animating them and inventing stories about their lives and personalities. When they were "ill," she worked to heal her pencil friends. A dull pencil was blind, and required a visit to the hospital, which was the pencil sharpener. Gazing at the bowls of pigment, one has the sense that Dhaliwal's real family are the colours. The rules of clan and culture pale beside these true kin.
Dhaliwal's adult life remains saturated with colour, and she continues to encounter the personalities of colour on her trips abroad; heaps of pigment in a Mysore market speak to boxes of pigment in a Venice shop window. These appear and reappear in her paintings and installations, sometimes in their original forms and sometimes transformed into vivid flowers.
The original impetus for Punjabi Sheets #1: Turbans (1989) was Dhaliwal's irritation at the separation of men and women at her brother's wedding more than 20 years ago. Women sat together sipping tea while the men danced and quaffed whisky. Once the men were occupied with drinking, the women were able to get up and dance. What came to interest Dhaliwal more than Sikh gender roles, however, were the codes of turban colour and folding intelligible only to someone initiated into that culture. In this way, her disagreeable experience was transformed into a formal arrangement of bright cloth.
If such work expresses uneasiness with the immigrant culture of her childhood, the wider society of Britain proved no more open. Dhaliwal's life is punctuated with incidents that underline her separateness. As a schoolgirl in the mid-1960s, she revealed that she'd eventually like to teach English, but was told by her teacher that this was impossible. It seemed that English people would not care to be taught English by someone who wasn't English. Experiences such as these seem to inform what the artist Richard Fung has called the "aching loneliness of her images."
It was vegetables, however, that really got her into trouble.
In art school in the 1970s, Dhaliwal decided to paint a cabbage. She began with the centre leaf and laboriously finished it before moving on to the next. She was swiftly informed that her technique of cabbage painting defied two thousand years of tradition. No, her teachers insisted, you must block out the entire canvas first and, besides, it's much too colourful. Then she began to work with textiles, constructing what look like enormous hanging onions or odd nests manufactured by demented weaver birds. No, the teachers instructed, it would be far better to simply stretch a string across the room. Minimalism, you know. Perhaps you'd like to become a seamstress.
Dhaliwal's work became a place to heal such wounds, using materials and images she encountered on her journeys. A turning point came with the Zanzibar Tea Garden paintings of the 1980s. Dhaliwal realized she could not only fabricate an entire world, but also devise the rules by which it functioned. The gardens she invented brought together images from her travels, some of which would reappear in later works. This process of creative bricolage requires an avid eye, one that sorts and selects a vase from Egypt, trees from Versailles and poppies from Holland, peppers from London and mangos from India, and folds them all together in an imaginary garden.
The artist's preoccupation with flowers and vegetables derives both from an interest in things that grow and from a somewhat wistful recognition that the perennial plant is a metaphor for stability. When Dhaliwal first arrived in England as a small child in the 1950s, her family frequently moved house, engaging in what, at the time, was the un-English habit of buying and selling properties for profit. Many had luxuriant gardens created by their English owners, but these were immediately dug up and replanted with vegetables by Dhaliwal's practical parents. The appearance and reappearance of colourful perennials in her work are a way of restoring these ruined flower beds.
In the years following art college in Britain, Dhaliwal continued to travel and to collect the images that would appear in later work. She lived in Holland and France before travelling overland to India with a Dutch boyfriend, observing sights and sounds along the old Silk Road as she backpacked across Afghanistan. Once she crossed into India, she discovered that it was she who had become exotic, travelling with her European boyfriend. Seven years later, she travelled to Cyprus, where she was struck by the British-style postboxes and telephone kiosks she saw there. The Shipping Forecast (1998) is typical of the way Dhaliwal layers years' worth of seemingly disparate images and experiences. Initially conceived as a meditation on two islands, Cyprus and England, the piece found its impetus in an experience Dhaliwal had after returning from Cyprus, when she walked past a Greek barber on St. Clair Avenue West in Toronto and saw a lemon tree in the window. She began by painting postboxes at the centre of the piece, then added the islands, then photographs of herself and her Dutch friend as children, then images of places she loved in Kingston and finally images recycled from previous paintings. The map of Cyprus is overlaid with a painting the artist made from memory of the pattern of one of her mother's dresses. The Shipping Forecast also reflects her ongoing interest in classification and mapping, and the various ways we invest the objects we encounter with meaning.
Questions of cultural identity came to the fore for many artists in the 1980s and 90s. Some artists of colour chose to incorporate cultural material into their work—to claim territory and to challenge formalist models of value in art. Sometimes there was pressure to make work that asserted cultural values and identity. This meant that a South Asian artist was expected to make work about South Asian kinds of things.
Although Dhaliwal is well aware of the politics of race, she has always understood that artists could be limited by the strictures of identity. She expressed this most explicitly in Teepees and Tigers: From One Indian to Another (1996), a work that was made in response to a challenge to non-Natives using images of teepees in their work. She found the teepees she painted for that piece on an old piece of fabric, reminding us that we stumble on images anywhere and everywhere.
For example, At Badminton (1998) depicts three images of a sari-clad woman playing badminton. Dhaliwal explains that she'd never worn saris because she assumed they were restrictive. But meeting the performance artist Shauna Beharry, who plays sports dressed in traditional Indian clothes, made her think again. In this sense the work is about cultural identity. But when we look closer, we see other images interwoven into the piece: tiles from a wall in Portugal, a door from Egypt and arches from China, trees from Mexico, Britain and India, a flower from Canada and the border of a sari.
This strategy of bricolage is reminiscent of Frida Kahlo, who appears in Dhaliwal's Triple Self-Portrait with Persimmons and Pomegranates (1988) and other works. It is difficult to wade through the hype surrounding Kahlo—her role as a feminist icon, her politics and theatrical personal life—to appreciate her contribution to the visual arts. The symbols and images in her work refer back to religious paintings, but also comprise an entirely personal vocabulary. For example, in the late painting Marxism Will Give Health to the Sick (1954), Kahlo's body becomes the metaphor for society's ills. In this way her self-portraits are not simply ruminations on marriage, divorce and illness, but rather situate these events within larger contexts. Like Kahlo, Dhaliwal realizes that the path to a wider vision becomes available through the construction of a personal assemblage of experiences, events and observations.
Sometimes the discoveries of the road bring her to her own past. Returning to her family's Indian village for the first time in 2002, Dhaliwal realized how different her life would have been had her family not emigrated to Britain. Encountering a work-roughened woman she'd played with as a small child, Dhaliwal realized that everything in her head came from emigration and travel, from her journey across space.
In a message to me she wrote:
I also talked about memories I had from being three and four years old and they were able to tell me what they meant: I remember a man who used to come on a bicycle with a pannier on the front that contained the most delicious white cold sweet ice wrapped in green leaves. And they remembered too.
At times, the trip took on a magical quality:
I also went to my father's village and saw the tiny broken- down house where he lived with his family. It was full of dust and cobwebs and hornets' nests. Sitting in the house was a huge white owl! I was going to take a picture but it must have heard me and flew out in an enormous gust of flapping wings. At that very moment a flock of bright green parrots was circling and swooping overhead.
After the 2002 trip, her work took on a new emphasis: healing. Restoration and renewal, often focusing on herself and her family, had always been a large part of her art, but she began to think about children who died after suffering the cruelty of others. It requires courage to attempt to transform this kind of pain, and the book of yellow (2003) was her way of offering remembrance to child victims such as Randal Dooley, Reena Virk and others. The title refers to the books stored in the mythic, intangible Akashic library of mystic spirituality, in which the stories of lives are archived after death. She writes:
Because, at least, the little, inconsequential details of the brief lives of Randal and Reena would be documented in the Akashic Records, according to some logical cataloguing system that made sense of their short stay on earth. This notion, to a small degree, did bring me comfort.
Dhaliwal used handmade paper to construct books based on those archived in the Heritage Library in Port of Spain, then named them after gorgeous shades of yellow. Her books became a source of solace and rebirth, and of courage in the face of desolation and horror.
curtains for babel x, y & z (2003) brackets the names of dead and dying languages with exquisite colour, but here the healing seems incomplete. One has the sense that Dhaliwal is doing her best, evincing a desperate bravery in the face of the mindless destruction of what she recognizes as a radiant diversity. Again, colour is the vehicle for this transformation, but is nearly overwhelmed by the austerity of the work. Still, she refuses to impose narrative on her material; rather, meaning is allowed to float and circulate, allowing viewers to invest what they will.
Dhaliwal's work underlines the difference between the migrant, who moves from one place to another out of necessity, and the nomad, whose crossings derive from the pleasures of the road. Immigration often entails difficulty and loss. But the nomad has learned to enjoy movement and dislocation, even if the price is separateness. I imagine Dhaliwal trekking across the steppes and bringing back the treasures of the road. They are treasures she has made herself.
Spring 2006
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