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BRONZE
Title: BRONZE
Pages : 123
Year : 2006
Text : 1) ‘A Sculptor’s Musings [& An Introduction]’, Madan Lal
2) ‘Remembering Ram Kinker Baij . . . ‘, Prof. Sankho Chaudhuri
3) ‘Bronze: Shifting Mind – Engaging Space’, Pradosh Kumar Mishra
4) ‘Shifting Terrains: Concepts, Mediums, Materials and Techniques in Contemporary Sculpture’, Ashrafi S. Bhagat
5) ‘Sculpted Images’, Prayag Shukla
Extract
Sculpture as a medium has undergone rapid transformation defying any definitive; with its boundaries dissolving and becoming fluid. Some methods as bronze casting remain bound to tradition but have been revitalized with many new different alloys, recasting it with a new avatar that makes it very contemporary. Sculpture has come away from its earlier decorative and embellished function to become an essential human resource touching all spheres of life. Today, sculptors interrogate solidity, monumentality and stasis. The contemporary experience has also witnessed fluidity in geographical spaces, making the emergence of the spectre of interdiaspora; and artists who had moved from India to the west are now marking their return. The discursivity of the folk art and craft tradition reconciling with modernism had marked the space of modernity, pre-independence and continues to configure the same within the contemporary milieu. In fact, the search for an individualized visual language, which would embody as artist’s aesthetic perception and concepts, fundamentally evolves from his sense of belonging to his or her own indigenous cultures; thus arises the need and quest for a unique Indian identity while negotiating modernity, i.e. a dilemma of looking towards the west and simultaneously assimilating indigenous tradition continues to remain an important theme in sculptural practice and manifests itself today in a variety of ways. This process fundamentally has remained dialectical throwing up new froms whose aesthetics remain in a state of flux, as installations, or assemblages; terminologies borrowed from the west, but constituting within our milieu an integral dimension of material culture in various ritual practices and worship as the pooja or an aarti thali in which the aesthetics of assemblage will ever remain unique.