{"id":141696,"date":"2024-05-02T14:54:14","date_gmt":"2024-05-02T21:54:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=141696"},"modified":"2024-05-06T14:15:51","modified_gmt":"2024-05-06T21:15:51","slug":"academics-art-historians-ethereal-aesthetes-know-your-money-materials-machines-machinations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2024\/05\/02\/academics-art-historians-ethereal-aesthetes-know-your-money-materials-machines-machinations\/","title":{"rendered":"Academics, Art Historians & Ethereal Aesthetes: Know Your Money, Materials, Machines & Machinations!"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kanishka Hevavisenthi<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

(A review of: \u2018Between Abstraction & Empathy in Sarath Chandrajeewa\u2019s Visual Paraphrases\u2019 by Santhushya Fernando, Laleen Jayamanne and Sumathy Sivamohan) <\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018In the early 1950s\u2026 the US government passed a law which allowed income-tax relief to any citizen giving a work of art to an US museum: the relief was immediate, but the work of art did not have to go to the museum till the owner\u2019s death. The purpose of this measure was to encourage the import of European works of art. (There is still the residue of the magical belief that to own art confirms power.) In England the law was changed \u2013 in order to discourage the export of art \u2013 so that it became possible to pay death duties with works of art instead of money. Both pieces of legislation increased prices in salerooms throughout the art-loving world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There was another reason\u2026By the early 1950s the amount of money available for investment had increased to an unprecedented degree. The reconstruction after the war, the stimulus of rearmament, the consolidation of the developed economies at the expense of the underdeveloped ones, had all led to a situation where there the possibilities of foreign and colonial investment had changed since pre-war days. The sums involved were now too vast for the average private investor to take private decisions: now he simply handed his capital over to a highly-organized investing group. Monopoly capitalism becomes anonymous in character for the average investor no less than for the average employee. Consequently, there were investors who were looking \u2013 as a side-line \u2013 for a field of investment which offered a chance of personal interest and excitement, whilst remaining comparatively safe. Some of them found art. And so, art, at about this time, took in certain lives the place that was once occupied by South American railways, Bolivian tin, or tea plantations in Ceylon. Within ten years the prices in the art salerooms increased at least tenfold.\u2019 \u2013 Berger, John, The Success and Failure of Picasso<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Island\u201d <\/em>carried a 3-part series entitled Between Abstraction & Empathy in<\/em> Sarath Chandrajeewa\u2019s Visual Paraphrases\u201d<\/em> by three very lost academics, lost in the word wars providing dissimulatory droning to camouflage imperialism\u2019s long-range missiles and monetary debt-gouging. We do not wish to focus on Chandrajeewa\u2019s art or what these academics have written on his art, or the views expressed in the past on art, film and politics by a gang that includes one pro-Eelamist academic, and another domiciled on stolen land in Australia, although there are many commonalities between the artist and these two critics \u2013 the third academic is a thankfully unknown number.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They have all valorised the Nuland- and Chung-inspired Galle Face anarchy, NGO art and films. Chandrajeewa has served his political masters well, for perennially devalued silver, such as Premadasa’s Gam Udava and Mangala \u2018Innocent\u2019 Samaraweera\u2019s Ahinsakayange Aramaya\u201d<\/em> (which when demolished was greeted by the studious silence of the NGO brush-wielders and chisellers). Chandrajeewa and these academics congratulated the blindfolding during the anarchy of the statue of SWRD Bandaranaike (carved by the great Soviet sculptor Lev Kerbel and donated by the USSR). Both Chandrajeewa and the lost Australian academic defend this infantile iconoclasm \u2013 the sculptor by even claiming to be a student of Kerbel (who carved famous statues of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These academics having long said goodbye to such an emancipatory heritage, prefer to deploy an eye-watering mythical jargon in their writings. Rather than examining how a common national language can be forged, understanding the vital indispensable role Sinhala Buddhism has played in the country\u2019s survival as an independent entity, and seeing how Tamil and Malayali and Malay and Arabic can be bridge languages to link us to the wider world around us, they deride Sri Lanka as an ethno-nationalist state\u201d. They insult the masses as ethno-centric parochial Lankans\u201d, decrying our Sinhalization and Buddhisization\u201d, ethno-religious supremacy\u201d, and virulent Sinhala nationalism pursuing cultural purity\u201d, etc. They join in the hallelujah chorus of US envoy Julie Chung, becoming spokespersons for an imagined Malaiyaha\u201d<\/em> at the expense of an impoverished peasantry marginalized by the English genocide and occupation of the Kandyan highlands of Sinhale.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the third part of the series published on 22 April 2024, the writers say In Sarath\u2019s exhibition Visual Paraphrases<\/em> there are three abstract paintings titled Unwritten I, II, III<\/em> \u2026\u201d The writers claim that It is no accident that Unwritten III<\/em> was purchased by H.D. Premasiri, sponsor and Chairman of the famed book shop happily named Sarasawiya (University).\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let it be understood that Premasiri\u2019s renowned publishing house and network of bookshops are named Sarasavi\u201d,<\/em> not Sarasaviya <\/em>(University) as vulgarized by these three critics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most comical part of this piece is how the three academics earnestly \u2018inform\u2019 the \u2018Anglophile reader\u2019 who may not know this history: Sarasawiya<\/em> has also published one of the most significant cultural magazines or newspapers and also sponsored the very first film festival of Sinhala films, raising its cultural prestige among the intelligentsia of the country\u201d. What type of wrong information are these anglomanic writers give to \u2018the Anglophile reader\u2019?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sarasavi<\/em><\/strong> (or Sarasvati<\/em><\/strong>) is the Hindu goddess (or patron) who represents learning, knowledge, wisdom, creativity, music and art. Sarasaviya<\/em><\/strong> was the term coined by Munidasa Cumaratunga<\/em> for university instead of Vishva Vidyalaya<\/em>. He may have been influenced by Sarasavi Maduwa<\/em><\/strong> (Sarasvati Mandapaya<\/em> or seat of learning) as in the verse in the ancient Sinhala classic Kavyashekaraya<\/em><\/strong>.<\/strong> The second verse of ancient Sinhala classic Kawsilumina<\/em><\/strong> <\/strong>pronounces let people become poets even with a fleeting glance of Sarasvati.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sarasaviya<\/em> newspaper<\/strong>, exclusively devoted to film was launched on 10 April 1963 (Meemana Prematillaka<\/em> as founding editor), by Associated Newspaper Company Ltd (ANCL \u2013 Lake House), and the Sarasaviya Film Festival<\/em><\/strong> was first launched on 9 May 1964 by ANCL and the Sarasaviya<\/em> newspaper (Wimalasiri Perera<\/em> as its editor). Maestro Amaradeva <\/em>sang its theme song, Jagan Mohinee -Madhura Bhashinee \u2013 Charu Dehinee- Sarasvati Devi Wande\u201d<\/em> (a eulogy to goddess Sarasvati-<\/em>lyrics by <\/em>Wimalasiri Perera<\/em><\/strong><\/em>, <\/s>continued in every subsequent festival. During this period Sarasavi Bookshop<\/em> was owned and managed by Premasiri\u2019s uncle, as a solitary institution adjoining the old Nugegoda post office. Premasiri was a child at that time. Fortunately, these academics and art historians do not attribute (construction of) Sarasavi Uyana<\/em><\/strong> (University Park) Railway<\/em><\/strong> Station<\/em><\/strong> at Peradeniya and (floating of) Sarasavi Hardware<\/em><\/strong> Stores<\/em><\/strong> at Maharagama to Mr.Premasiri!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Inadvertently we copied the preceding name -Wimalasiri Perera – the then editor of Sarasaviya newspaper as the lyricist of Sarasaviya Film Festival theme song sung by maestro Amaradeva.It should be corrected as the lyricist of the theme song was Sri Chandraratna Manavasinghe and NOT Wimalasiri Perera.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We apologise to our readers as well as the management of ANCL, present editor of Sarasaviya and the family members of the late Sri Chandraratna Manavasinghe for any inconvenience caused.)<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their concluding remarks the writers say In writing this piece we also worked alongside each other because it appears to us as a respectful way to collaborate, to make tracks in unfamiliar zones\u201d. What they have done by attributing the Sarasaviya<\/em> paper<\/em> and Sarasaviya Film Festival<\/em> to Mr. Premasiri, which they say was done by working alongside each other\u201d only amounts to collaborating\u201d to distort history, and deceiving the Anglophile reader\u201d as well as implanting landmines in familiar zones. By attacking Sinhala-Buddhist Nationalists\u201d in everything they write, while harping on linguistic violence and ethno-nationalism\u201d, they are not ashamed to state their allegiances to frigid St. Bridget\u2019s, to the brilliant lineage of Christian Burgher artists of Lanka\u201d, while tracing their (Tamil) Christian cultural lineage\u201d and Negombo Roman Catholicism!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As educated by her native informant Chandrajeewa, one of the authors marooned in Australia, defends David Paynter, saying he was discriminated against because he was a Lansi Catholic\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have elsewhere examined the reactionary role of the still-European-dominated Roman Catholic Church, their opposition to \u2018free\u2019 education, their portrayal on election posters of churches burning back in 1948 if \u2018Communists\u2019 won elections, the refusal to bury Catholics who voted for the \u2018Communists\u2019 (hence denying their children access to schools etc), their opposition to schools takeover and occupation of school premises, involvement in coups-d\u2019\u00e9tat and terrorism, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let us examine this \u2018Burgher\u2019 artist, whose \u2018brilliant\u2019 art includes the murals at the Trinity College chapel. David Paynter paints Jesus and various disciples and related New Testament <\/em>characters as white or at least tanned (no hint of even genetic improvement by local colour, though the lost Australian academic claims they are in \u2018brown skin tones\u2019) using some of his Burgher relatives and friends as models of the sacred. He also clothes and unclothes his homoeroticism and semi-clad Jesus in these murals. In the painting of the parable of the Good Samaritan<\/em> he has one character pat the rear of the other, perhaps to indicate an uncaring Levite urging another on, to avoid helping the victim of a robbery. But on the ass! One wonders if a push on the shoulder would have sufficed. Then again, Paynter was perhaps subliminally seeking to arouse the famed homoeroticism of cloistered Trinity boys at frustrated pubertal prayer. Photographs of these boys set against Paynter\u2019s pasty pastels show how inconsonant these \u2018brown\u2019 claims are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of course grows weary if not nauseated by the continued \u2018celebration\u2019 of a concrete canon of permissible heroes and heroines purportedly neglected but constantly glorified in the media, as if they are a subaltern category promising liberation. We rather dispose of the so-called Group of 1943<\/em> to the dung heaps of history where they really should belong (if any reader really wishes to know what else was really going on in the 1943 not portrayed in their celebrated art, they should read e-Con e-News<\/em>\u2019 recent rendition of that era at war to preserve English colonialism).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The expression and suppression of homoeroticism (a sophisticated word for homosexuality) is indeed a prominent theme in the art of the \u2018brilliant lineage\u2019 of these so-called exemplars of \u2018Sri Lankan\u2019 art, who resorted to a mocking orientalism to claim an anchor to the country. The neo-Aboriginal academic affects the fawning tones of a faghag<\/em><\/strong> (a derogatory term for a heterosexual woman who gets off by hanging onto gay men\u2019s hems) by referring to the \u2018musculature\u2019 of their rather gender-segregated rendering of the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rajiva Wijesinha\u2019s<\/em> recent effusive review in the Sunday Times<\/em> of SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda\u2019s,<\/em> George Keyt: The Absence of a Desired Image <\/em>notes that Keyt, whose heterosexual priapism inflicted on local womanhood mistook his pinsale<\/em> for his penis, \u2018destroyed an archive of Wendt pictures after his friend\u2019s death. Though a free spirit himself, perhaps his lack of interest in male beauty meant that Keyt thought of Wendt\u2019s pictures as demeaning and could not understand their artistic excellence.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wijesinha doesn\u2019t explore if Keyt\u2019s treatment of women sublimated his own homoerotic tendencies. We must confess that Keyt\u2019s so-called erotic idealized art leaves us frigid like that half-baked putty breudher in December. Despite Keyts\u2019 monetization by the Keells conglomerate, etc. \u2013 recalling modern art\u2019s inflated role as another device to hide profits, launder money (from arms and drug dealing during our prolonged wars), and avoid paying taxes \u2013 we are aware that Keyt rather mechanically stole from the cubism of Picasso, displaying none of the Andalusian\u2019s flair or dedication (Picasso a steadfast member of the French Communist Party until his death) even as Picasso stole from the Africans, particularly the fabulous art of the Niger Delta and Benin. Do any of these so-called artists or academics dare reflect the emerging role and struggles of workers and rural Sinhala cultivators in their so-called art, as a Mexican Diego Rivera decidedly did?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wijesinha refers to the illustrations Keyt rendered \u2018for various Buddhist publications that newspaper groups began to bring out in the 1920s, as an essential component of emerging nationalism<\/em>. \u2026 the seminal work in this respect of Lake House under D.R. Wijewardene, also inspired the Times<\/em>, while Buddhist Annuals were another regular outlet for a creativity based on a national vision\u2019. But what exactly was this \u2018national vision\u2019 that Wijesinha\u2019s relatives, the Wijewardenes, extolled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wijewardenes were part of the colonial press gang that chased out of the country the still-constantly disparaged Anagarika Dharmapala, the true forebear of Sinhala Buddhism and independence. The Wijewardenes were part of the English gangs (featuring the then-power company and now educational gatekeeper and visa-seller Pearson PLC) who also prevented DJ Wimalasurendra\u2019s vision to electrify the country through local industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, what exactly is this \u2018male beauty\u2019 that the unrepentant orientalist Wendt appreciated in Sri Lanka. And what exactly was the role of these so-called artists, who we hesitantly call \u2018Sri Lankan.\u2019 What national issues did they exactly prioritize and highlight?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The marooned Australian academic also comments on Heywood, forerunner of University of Visual Arts, but her information is pure hearsay. The battle at Heywood was between so-called \u2018Western\u2019 and \u2018Oriental\u2019 art, over giving undue prominence to this \u2018Western\u2019 art, amidst the usual clamour for an equal distribution of foreign trips and scholarships. The reddha-<\/em>wearing Sinhala teachers were the \u2018minority\u2019. As informed by lost-native Chandrajeewa, the lost Australian says Sinhala supremacists dubbed Paynter as a \u2018Christian Lansiya\u2019<\/em>. But she and Chandrajeewa forget that the \u2018Western\u2019 tribe at Heywood attacked their opponents, telling them to use ancient paint material (makulu mati, dorana<\/em> oil etc.) and ancient brushes (made of twigs or locally grown reeds) without using Reeves Greyhound<\/em> colours and hog-bristle or red sable brushes respectively.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We do recall Ananda Coomaraswamy\u2019s famed An Open Letter to the Kandyan Chiefs<\/em> at the dawn of the 20th century, lamenting the neglect of famed local paints in the new artwork inflicted (by such US and English multinational corporations like Dupont\/Dulux) on traditional temples. One of the biggest scandals that befell the country in the 19thC, the robbery of temple lands, is only given brief mention in that letter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another myth propagated by the lost Australian academic is that Chandrajeewa introduced terracotta art<\/em><\/strong>.<\/em> However, it has been there for all the world to see, if they dare, that it has been a material long used by our artisans. Maeti Vaeda<\/em><\/strong> (clay work) has been taught in our schools from the 1950s and 1960s. HM Ellepola Somaratna (who translated into Sinhala Ananda Coomaraswamy\u2019s famous work, John Davy and Henry Marshall), wrote textbooks on this matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The hagiographers of Chandrajeewa thus claim he is a \u2018rare craftsman\/artist working unusually, in clay, painting and bronze, Lanka\u2019s civilizational material culture and art<\/em>, according to Ananda Coomaraswamy\u2019. The omission of steel is curious not just because of the recent sabotage of the Ceylon Steel Corporation, developed with the support of the USSR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 400-years of decline of Lanka following the South Indian invasions of the Rajarata and the Anuradhapura Kingdom, were accompanied by a drastic loss of steel technology, even as modern researchers have found many wind-blown blast furnaces dating from 7-11th<\/sup> centuries, producing high-quality iron & steel. This technology appears subsequently to have been lost (or hidden), and indeed Coomaraswamy himself noted the regressive methods of steel making in his report on Sabaragamuwa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We should add that unlike Dharmapala, Coomaraswamy was a part of those Indian-allied liberals, poets, politicians and theorists, from Tamilnadu\u2019s Bharati to North India\u2019s Nehru to the Malayali Panikkar, who deny Sri Lanka\u2019s long contiguous and centripetal history, and declare Sri Lanka as a part of an India that never was united until the English East India Company claimed to unite it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These academics \u2013 calling themselves \u2018doctors\u2019 and professors\u2019 also claims that Chandrajeewa, as Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies of the University of Visual and Performing Arts (UVPA) nominated Barbara Sansoni<\/em> to be awarded an honorary doctorate. (UVPA has become a factory awarding Ph.D. (honoris causa)<\/em> degrees). How could he do so? It was not his university or place to do so. The Sansonis and other tourist panderers of Colombo have served to valorize handicraft rather than demanding its advancement by modern machine-making technology, even as the so-called Academy of Design is a front for the German industrial import mafia in Sri Lanka, and Mercedes Benz Co. (The foreign exchange spent on one such imported luxury car could pay for a machine to enable light industry, which could then go on to produce tools and machines etc., but this is another tale.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The origin of the UVPA are traced back to 1893, when the Ceylon Technical College<\/strong> was established, with drawing and design among the first courses taught there. How the English diverted the country from the \u2018drawing and design\u2019 of modern machine-making <\/strong>to an effete \u2018Arts and Aesthetics\u2019 entombed in the gallery and studio, at the mercy of the arbitrary whims and fancies of Wall Street\u2019s fund managers, is indeed a story yet to be told. Another game is to alienate Tamil people and language from Sinhala Buddhist culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The constant attack on Sinhala Buddhism and a united culture by the academic gangs and their artistic cavalcades riding imported cars funded by imperialism, recalls some very important historical and truly heretical citations:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 \u2018Throughout the world, the period of the final victory of capitalism over feudalism has been linked up with national movements. For the complete victory of commodity production, the bourgeoisie must capture the home market, and there must be politically united territories whose population speak a single language, with all obstacles to the development of that language and to its consolidation in literature eliminated. Therein is the economic foundation of national movements. Language is the most important means of human intercourse. Unity and unimpeded development of language are the most important conditions for genuinely free and extensive commerce on a scale commensurate with modern capitalism, for a free and broad grouping of the population in all its various classes and, lastly, for the establishment of a close connection between the market and each and every proprietor, big or little, and between seller and buyer.\u2019 \u2013Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2022 \u2018Proletarian in content, national in form such is the universal culture towards which socialism is proceeding. Proletarian culture does not abolish national culture, it gives it content. On the other hand, national culture does not abolish proletarian culture, it gives it form. The slogan of national culture was a bourgeois slogan so long as the bourgeoisie was in power and the consolidation of nations proceeded under the aegis of the bourgeois order. The slogan of national culture became a proletarian slogan when the proletariat came to power, and when the consolidation of nations began to proceed under the aegis of Soviet power\u2019 \u2013 J. Stalin<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We end by noting <\/em><\/strong>e-Con e-News<\/em>\u2019 recent definition of imperialism<\/em><\/strong>, which includes the prevention of modern vocational and technical education<\/strong>, especially through on-the-job training<\/strong> in machine-industrialization, and the wholesale diversion of education<\/strong> into non-technical pursuits and conceits, etc. This is indeed apposite for and opposite to the so-called modern art business in Sri Lanka as exemplified by these imported brushers and chisellers and academic shills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(We thank Sena Thoradeniya for sharing his views regarding Sarasavi, Heywood and Ellepola Somaratna).<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kanishka Hevavisenthi (A review of: \u2018Between Abstraction & Empathy in Sarath Chandrajeewa\u2019s Visual Paraphrases\u2019 by Santhushya Fernando, Laleen Jayamanne and Sumathy Sivamohan) \u2018In the early 1950s\u2026 the US government passed a law which allowed income-tax relief to any citizen giving a work of art to an US museum: the relief was immediate, but the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141696\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}