Artful Resistance: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka
(Alternstadt: ZKF Publishers, 2010).
Modernism in Sri Lanka: What Was It?
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century in an erstwhile colony, the question of what “modernism” was looms large as one tries to grasp the relevance of the term or its given definitions to one’s social existence and issues of identity.[1] The picture that emerges when toiling with such an investigation is hazy and presents itself a vexed problem. But however vexed the problem is, it cannot be bypassed whenever one tries to “understand” or to “read” the kind of art that was produced in the twentieth century and labeled “modern” in societies like Sri Lanka. Writing on twentieth-century modernist art in countries like Sri Lanka demands an attempt to define the tension-loaded relationship between modernization and nationalism. In order to do this, I would argue that one has to look for all forms of “political action” taken by the late nineteenth- or early twentieth- century cultural practitioners which can be regarded as modernist in nature—taking the word “political” in its widest sense. Such discoveries from the past will help us to reperiodize the “modern” in relation to our own historical experience. Many South Asian scholars have recently spent quite a substantial amount of their creative and critical energies to examine this highly complex issue (see, e.g., Kapur 2000, Sinha 2003).
The beginnings of modernism in art in South Asia are contested. In India the debate on the beginnings of modernism shifts between Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) and Amrita Sher- Gil (1913–41) (Sinha 2003: 1), while for Sri Lanka it is generally attributed to the artists of the so-called ’43 Group of 1943. One of the immanent aspects of modernism in art is that it has always been internationalist in spirit and as such has always tried to incorporate/appropriate visual motifs and methods from cultures and traditions other than its own.[2] Taking into account colonial politics and the resultant tensions, the meaning and function of these gestures of incorporation/appropriation of foreign motifs and methods into one’s vocabulary of art making has necessarily been to confront and pacify particular social and political anxieties of the practitioners and the society to which they belonged.
When looking at South Asia with this criterion of internationalism in mind, and taking it as a defining one, we can see many “proto-modern” South Asian artists who played an important transitional role from premodern to the modern. For India then, artists such as Raja Ravi Varma and the artists of the Kalighat painting tradition (c. 1820s to 1930s) become the first proto-modernists, while in Sri Lanka the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century temple muralists of Sri Subodharamaya of Dehivala, Botale Rajamaha Viharay of Botale, and the popular Buddhist muralist M. Sarlis can be attributed the title of early or proto-modernist. One of the key features of these proto-modernists was their continued involvement with a traditional thematic content, which they presented within a pictorial construction informed and influenced by foreign motifs, visual metaphors, and techniques which most of these artists visually translated in relation to their inherited traditional skills and aesthetics.
1940s: The Truly Modern “Modernism” in Art—the ’43 Group
The first most significant movement in modern art in Sri Lanka began to gather momentum in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the works of photographer Lionel Wendt (1900–44) and the paintings of George Keyt (1901–93), Justin Deraniyagala (1903–67), and Geoffrey Beling (1907–92), who later formed the core of Sri Lanka’s most important collective of modern artists, the ’43 Group, together with several other dynamic artist personalities such as Ivan Peries (1921–88), George Claessen (1909–99), Richard Gabriel (1924–2016), and a few others (Weereratne 1993; cp. also Wendt 2000, Keyt 2001, Bandaranayake and Fonseka 1996).
It was the ’43 Group who positioned the sign of the École de Paris as the mark of excellence in art taste in mid-twentieth century Sri Lanka against the academic realism and orientalism influenced by the Royal Academy and other British art schools (Bandaranayake n.d.: 3–5). As such, the formation of the ’43 Group can be viewed as a project which constituted an anticolonial stance within the larger picture of national struggles for regaining political independence from the British colonizers, which gathered impetus in South Asia in the mid-twentieth century (Weerasinghe 2000: 5). The most significant achievement of the ’43 Group can be considered their successful attempts at rephrasing a selected number of modernist trends and artistic approaches which flourished in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, giving rise to a distinctively Sri Lankan modernist art. Of the members of the ’43 Group, George Keyt can be considered the most well-known Sri Lankan modernist, whose work combined a modernist idiom rooted in a “Cubism-like” pictorial language with orientalist themes, motifs, and moods. His works played a pivotal role in the popularization of modern art in Sri Lanka. If Keyt is to be considered the “Orientalist visionary” in the ’43 Group, then the works of Justin Deraniyagala and Ivan Peries represented the two extremes of expressionist trends of the ’43 Group. The intense and complex psychological dispositions portrayed in Deraniyagala’s canvases subtly explore and reveal the tragedy and irony of the human condition, while the symbolic and meditative landscapes of Ivan Peries suggest extreme tranquility and compassion.
1950s: Nationalism and Modernism
Parallel to the formation of the ’43 Group, there were other trends active in the Sri Lankan art scene during the mid-twentieth century. The ultra-nationalist discourse in art, which demanded a “pure” Sri Lankan/Asian art form untainted by Western influences, was one of the two major artistic forces. This trend can be considered the cultural and artistic expression of the nationalist politics of S. W. R. D. Bandaranayake.[3] The other important presence in the art scene was the artistic trend influenced by the Shantiniketan school of art founded by Rabindranath Tagore, which expressed a much broader sense of the idea of “nationality” and “modernity.” However much the exponents of both of these trends attempted to formulate a genuinely Sri Lankan artistic discourse, the basic parameters of their existence as artists and of their work were necessarily modernist and Western. They were inevitably the products of a political, social, and educational system introduced, nurtured, and administered by the Western colonial powers. At any rate they were also highly individualist artists in every sense, as were the artists of the ’43 Group, against whom they had pitted their artistic practices.
While most of the trends that emerged from the nationalist discourse of the 1950s are now forgotten, one remains active to date. It is the approach that looked at painting as illustrating poetry and poetical moods. Most of the exponents of this style were poets themselves. The earliest artist of this line was Ananda Samarkoon (1911–62), and it received a fresh lease of life in the hands of Mahagama Sekera (1929–76) in the 1960s and 1970s. Mahagama Sekera was a trained artist who received his education at the Government College of Art (currently the University of Fine and Performing Arts). He was better known as a highly acclaimed poet. His paintings could be considered accompaniments to his extremely lyrical poetic expressions. Currently this trend can be seen continued in Champani Devika’s (1961–) poetry-paintings, which she usually publishes in national papers.
1960s: Institutionalization of Modernist Art
Currently Sri Lanka has an entire university dedicated to the study of fine arts: the University of Fine and Performing Arts. This institution has a history that goes back to the late nineteenth century. It first came into being as a section in the Government Technical College during British rule in Sri Lanka, and as such the kind of artistic practices and aesthetics that it supported from its inception were formed after academic realism of the British art academies of the time.[4] The important artists who were associated with the art college in the early twentieth century were such academic realists as David Paynter (1900–75) and J. D. A. Perera (1897–1967). As such, the Government College of Art was not open to modernist art which was taking position in Sri Lanka’s art scene by the hands of the artists of the ’43 Group. It took a unique individual endowed with immense creative potential and a radical personality such as Stanley Abeysinghe (1914–95) to change the established academic realist art tradition of the Government College of Art to that of the modern. Abeysinghe institutionalized the radical and innovative achievements in art established by the ’43 Group in the 1940s and 1950s.
With the triumph of the modernist tradition in- and outside of academia, one can see the basic modernist language of art becoming “the way” to do art in Sri Lanka. Since then the modernist art vocabulary has made it possible for artistic personalities with different and opposing tempers to emerge, and they have enriched the modernist art scene in various ways.
The modernist art tradition of Sri Lanka has mainly been a scene of painters, not much of sculptors. The first modernist Sri Lankan sculptor of importance was Tissa Ranasinghe (1925–2019), who has rephrased modernist sculpture in relation to Sri Lankan/South Asian experiences since the 1960s. Ranasinghe’s figurative sculpture can be considered a three-dimensional expression of the painted visions of the ’43 Group. His influence can still be seen in contemporary Sri Lankan sculpture. There was hardly a figurative sculptor working in a modernist line after Ranasinghe who could exceed his vision and innovative approach. An exception may be Mahinda Wijesekera, who actually enriched what Ranasinghe accomplished in his work by adding a lyrical dimension to modernist sculpture. The next most important development in modernist sculpture can be seen in the non-figurative works of H. A. Karunaratne, who is a well established abstract painter as well.
1970s: Institutionalization of Abstract Art
As indicated above, the two decades spanning the late 1960s to the late 1980s experienced relatively less dynamism in art in comparison with the 1940s and 1950s, except for an important development that had far-reaching consequences in terms of method and style in painting. Up until the 1960s Sri Lankan modern painting was mostly a figurative one which evolved with inspirations absorbed from such major European schools as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and other similar trends, except for an artist like George Claessen of the ’43 Group, who was both an abstractionist and a representational painter. This situation began to change in the 1960s with the entrance of the non-figurative tradition of painting into Sri Lankan modern art as a result of the works, ideas, and teachings of the painter and art teacher H. A. Karunaratne (born 1929). In other words, it was H. A. Karunaratne who established the sign of the New York School as the mark of excellence in art making in Sri Lankan painting.
Karunaratne, who had spent spells of art training in New York and Tokyo in the 1960s, was a lecturer in painting at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies (IAS) of the University of Kelaniya (currently the University of Fine and Performing Arts). This is the only art institution in the country which offers a degree-level education. Being an established teacher at the IAS, Karunaratne was in a privileged position to persuade a whole generation of younger artists to work within the ideas of abstraction and abstract expressionism.
1980s: Crisis in Paradise
In 1971 Sri Lanka experienced its first insurgency since regaining political independence from the British, led by a Marxist oriented political party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), whose constituency was composed mainly of Sinhala-Buddhist rural youth from the southern regions of the island. In many ways this uprising, which had its roots in the sufferings and frustrations of long neglected rural youth, and the resultant brutalities signaled the bloody decades ahead of Sri Lanka. The 1971 insurgency and the atrocities accompanying the combating of rural insurgents by the armed forces, likewise composed mainly of Sinhala-Buddhist individuals, revealed the social potential of Sinhala-Buddhist southern society for the tolerance and justification of violence within the parameters of partisan politics. It exposed the self-destructive potential of society in the south of Sri Lanka. The violent incidents and the sufferings rural youth had to undergo during the insurgency, as well as the socio-political and moral issues which surfaced in its wake did not find their way into mainstream art practice as the institutional tutelage of art was enamored with the idea of exploring the spiritual dimensions and sublime truths in art making.
However, by the late 1970s and in the early 1980s one could see signs of displeasure, frustration, and memories of violence appearing in the works of two artists: Nayananada Vijayakulatillake (1947–) and S. H. Sarath (born 1948). Of the two artists, Vijayakulatillake was an insurgent himself and consequently spent a term in jail. His art recorded his time in prison and his anger toward the armed forces. Sarath sarcastically commented in his drawings on various aspects of the establishment, which he held responsible for human rights violations on the one hand and for uncritical acceptance of consumer capitalism on the other. Works of both of these artists could not give rise to any new dimensions in art making as such, as both of them worked within a highly modernist discourse of art, and their work with interventionist tones remained within the narrow limits of “art as protest.”
The 1990s: Pluralism and “Paramodernism”
The decade of the 1990s was an exceptionally creative period for modernist art in Sri Lanka. During these years Sri Lankan art went beyond the cusp of high modernism and entered a phase charged with post- or late-modernist criticality.[5]
A whole new generation of artists equipped with a range of new ideas and concepts of art, themes for artistic investigation, and especially with an understanding of the idea of the artist as a political individual have come to dominate the art scene in Sri Lanka. What is obvious when looking at this outburst of artistic talent is that the artists of the new generation are making a major theoretical assault on almost all the established ideas and thoughts on art making in Sri Lanka. What is also important to note here is that most of the animators of this highpowered movement are a group of young men and women who were forced to spend their teenage years in a highly chaotic social and political environment in their rural villages and hometowns. These radically new, yet artfully interesting young men and women are attacking the established ideas of excellence in art from a consciousness formed within the habitus of rural periphery, by positioning their “bodies” and “lives” as the crux of the matter of art making, In other words, “small-town” Sri Lanka is impacting its mark on Colombo’s metropolitan art world.
In a way, most of the works of the artists who emerged in the 1990s seem to portray them as a group of people living with memories of violence, dispossession, and despair on the one hand, and as if they were casualties of the alluringly strange beauty and evasive nature of urban culture on the other hand. At the same time, the prime force that sustains their artistic activities, I would argue, is a struggle to convert the self-realization of their oppressed and marginalized position in society into a dynamism which allows them to surmount their despair and gain subsistence in the very society that “undesired” them in the recent past. In their artistic constructions they have transformed the frustrations, despair, and alienation ensuing from socio-political devastation and urban misimpression and chimera into ways and methods to become consummative and acknowledged in society.
The key feature of the art of the 1990s is its conscious effort to define art as an expression of “now” and “right here,” art and art making process as an expression of being contemporary. A majority of contemporary artists show a common conviction in their artistic efforts by necessarily placing themselves and their creative energies within the “current cultural moment” and its immediacy, and less frequently in the distant past. This necessity to be in the “current cultural moment” states a common idea held, consciously or unconsciously, by most contemporary artists: the refusal of a metaphysical narrative that couches a wish to be universal in a theological and trans-cultural sense (Weerasinghe 1998). In other words, this position negates the established conviction that a work of art is an enclosed entity with an objective self-existence.
This position has liberated them from two historical fetters: first from a tradition which was signified as “genuinely Sri Lankan” within the anticolonial and nation-building projects of the early and mid-twentieth century; and second from the confusing concept of art as “self” or “soul’s” expression, where “self” or “soul” are defined as an apolitical existence. These new ideological positions have been formulated within a formal body of artistic approaches and strategies where the sentiments and sensations of violence and frustration, the tensions and passions of consumer society, and the material/carnal and visual situations of the urban and rural middle class could be brought into the domain of high art and of contemporary affluent society. The art of the 1990s is an issues-driven art and an engagement with problems which are directly concerned with the “living reality” of society at large.
2000s: New directions—The Playfulness and Critique of Handmade Realities
If art in the 1990s made its presence felt through “irony-critique,” by the beginning of the first decade of the present century it is more involved with “playfulness-critique.”
Innovative art trends of the first years of the twenty-first century can be characterized by two important aspects. On the one hand they present a heightened sensitivity toward popular culture, consumerism, and tradition, and on the other hand they show a strong tendency toward making art in the manner of making craft objects. The idea of the “handmade” is a strong presence in contemporary art practice in Sri Lanka. For some of the younger contemporary artists making a work of art has become a process in which an “object of art” (as opposed to a “work of art”) shrouded in visual pleasure, curiosity, and surprise is being produced. The “object” thus created, while being capable of imparting visual pleasure, pushes the viewer into a realm where important issues pertaining to individuals and to contemporary Sri Lankan society at large are raised and confronted.
Conclusion
As one can see from the foregoing discussion, the artistic trends which developed in Sri Lanka since the 1990s provide a complex and wide-ranging repertoire. In the 1990s there was a critical move away from the asocial, taciturn, and aloof high modernist positions to socially committed and politically conscious approaches. As one can see today, this was a move which has caused a complete change in the way art is made and talked about. The theoretical basis, evolutionary history, and implicit or explicit conceptualization of current art practice defy description in terms of categories such as modernism or postmodernism. To say quite simply that it is “posttraditional” gives one breathing space. Nevertheless, this characterization is also misleading—as one can often see an underlying yearning for tradition, for an ideal lost, for roots in the past. Its immediate stylistic qualities have something in common with Euro- American modernism. At the same time, the critical stance on which most current artworks are constructed presents a postmodern aura. Just as the oxcart and the microchip jostle in the streets of Colombo—a postcolonial, ahistorical space in which history of technology is turned on its head—posttraditional, paramodern art practice addresses this confusing situation cheerfully, confidently, violently, with a sense of tragic irony.
References Cited
Bandaranayake, Senake
1996 Ivan Peries Paintings, 1938–88. Colombo: Tamarind Publications.
n.d. Sri Lankan Painting in the Twentieth Century. Unpublished manuscript.
George Keyt
2001 George Keyt. A Centennial Anthology. Colombo: The George Keyt Foundation.
Kapur, Geeta
2000 “When Was Modernism in Indian Art,” In: When was Modernism. Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Dehli: Tulika Press), 297–324.
Sinha, Gayatri (ed.)
2003 Indian art: An Overview. New Delhi: Rupa & Co.
Weerasinghe, Jagath
1998 No Glory, Sarath Kumarasiri, Recent Works at Heritage Gallery [18–36 April 1998]. Colombo.
2000 Introduction to catalogue. In: Made in IAS: An Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Installation Works by 16 Artists from the Institute of Aesthetic Studies of the University of Kelaniya, Gallery 706, Colombo, 11–20 July 2000 (Colombo: IAS), 3–5.
2002 “The Moments of Impact: The Art of the ’90s Trend in Sri Lanka,” In: Pooja Sood (ed), KHOJ 2001 International Artists’ Workshop (New Delhi: KHOJ International Artists’ Association), 85–88.
2005 “Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka,” In: Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change (Canberra: Pandanus Books), 180–193.
Weereratne, Neville
1993 43 Group. A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana Publishing.
Wendt, Lionel
2000 Lionel Wendt. A Centennial Tribute. Colombo: The Lionel Wendt Memorial Fund.
[1] This essay has been heavily drawn from three of my previous essays on the same subject; see Weerasinghe 2000, 2002, and 2005.
[2] 2. Modernist art of the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is abundant with instances which show artists of one tradition taking or appropriating symbols, methods, or motifs from another tradition which they have come to face as a result of colonial expansions of the West. These instances of appropriations have in essence been gestures of defiant political thoughts and actions. The Impressionists’ appropriation of Japanese design motifs and perspectives, Gauguin’s involvement with Tahitian imageries, and the inspirations and influences artists such as Matisse and Picasso acquired from African art are just a few examples in point.
[3] S. W. R. D. Bandaranayke was the founding leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party who became the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka in 1956. This Oxford-educated gentleman with an aristocratic family background launched his political campaign based on acutely nationalist foundations, which could gather momentum among the Sinhala-Buddhist rural masses.
[4] The art section of the Government Technical College was later upgraded to the status of Government College of Art. In the late 1970s it was affiliated to the university system and was endowed with the title of Institute of Aesthetic Studies, and in 2005 it was turned into an independent university.
[5] The impulse for this change in modernist art in Sri Lanka in the 1990s is considered to have been initiated by the works and teachings of Jagath Weerasinghe. His 1992 exhibition Anxiety is now considered to have opened a decisively new space for Sri Lankan art by showing hitherto unchartered narrative possibilities within a modernist discourse. Weerasinghe was not alone in this venture, he worked along with three other important Sri Lankan artists: Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Kingsley Gunatillake, and Anoli Perera. Thenuwara’s Barellism works, which transported an everyday mundane object into the realm of art, and Anoli Perera’s work constructed upon a strong feminist criticality along with Weerasinghe’s work pushed Sri Lankan art over the limits of High Modernism into a new terrain, which provided a conducive ideological environment for the growth of the ’90s Trend.
An overview of modernisms in Sri Lankan art of the twentieth century
Jagath Weerasinghe
Sourse:
Sylvia S. Kasprycki and Doris I. Stambaru ed.,
Artful Resistance: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka
(Alternstadt: ZKF Publishers, 2010).
Modernism in Sri Lanka: What Was It?
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century in an erstwhile colony, the question of what “modernism” was looms large as one tries to grasp the relevance of the term or its given definitions to one’s social existence and issues of identity.[1] The picture that emerges when toiling with such an investigation is hazy and presents itself a vexed problem. But however vexed the problem is, it cannot be bypassed whenever one tries to “understand” or to “read” the kind of art that was produced in the twentieth century and labeled “modern” in societies like Sri Lanka. Writing on twentieth-century modernist art in countries like Sri Lanka demands an attempt to define the tension-loaded relationship between modernization and nationalism. In order to do this, I would argue that one has to look for all forms of “political action” taken by the late nineteenth- or early twentieth- century cultural practitioners which can be regarded as modernist in nature—taking the word “political” in its widest sense. Such discoveries from the past will help us to reperiodize the “modern” in relation to our own historical experience. Many South Asian scholars have recently spent quite a substantial amount of their creative and critical energies to examine this highly complex issue (see, e.g., Kapur 2000, Sinha 2003).
The beginnings of modernism in art in South Asia are contested. In India the debate on the beginnings of modernism shifts between Raja Ravi Varma (1848–1906) and Amrita Sher- Gil (1913–41) (Sinha 2003: 1), while for Sri Lanka it is generally attributed to the artists of the so-called ’43 Group of 1943. One of the immanent aspects of modernism in art is that it has always been internationalist in spirit and as such has always tried to incorporate/appropriate visual motifs and methods from cultures and traditions other than its own.[2] Taking into account colonial politics and the resultant tensions, the meaning and function of these gestures of incorporation/appropriation of foreign motifs and methods into one’s vocabulary of art making has necessarily been to confront and pacify particular social and political anxieties of the practitioners and the society to which they belonged.
When looking at South Asia with this criterion of internationalism in mind, and taking it as a defining one, we can see many “proto-modern” South Asian artists who played an important transitional role from premodern to the modern. For India then, artists such as Raja Ravi Varma and the artists of the Kalighat painting tradition (c. 1820s to 1930s) become the first proto-modernists, while in Sri Lanka the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century temple muralists of Sri Subodharamaya of Dehivala, Botale Rajamaha Viharay of Botale, and the popular Buddhist muralist M. Sarlis can be attributed the title of early or proto-modernist. One of the key features of these proto-modernists was their continued involvement with a traditional thematic content, which they presented within a pictorial construction informed and influenced by foreign motifs, visual metaphors, and techniques which most of these artists visually translated in relation to their inherited traditional skills and aesthetics.
1940s: The Truly Modern “Modernism” in Art—the ’43 Group
The first most significant movement in modern art in Sri Lanka began to gather momentum in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the works of photographer Lionel Wendt (1900–44) and the paintings of George Keyt (1901–93), Justin Deraniyagala (1903–67), and Geoffrey Beling (1907–92), who later formed the core of Sri Lanka’s most important collective of modern artists, the ’43 Group, together with several other dynamic artist personalities such as Ivan Peries (1921–88), George Claessen (1909–99), Richard Gabriel (1924–2016), and a few others (Weereratne 1993; cp. also Wendt 2000, Keyt 2001, Bandaranayake and Fonseka 1996).
It was the ’43 Group who positioned the sign of the École de Paris as the mark of excellence in art taste in mid-twentieth century Sri Lanka against the academic realism and orientalism influenced by the Royal Academy and other British art schools (Bandaranayake n.d.: 3–5). As such, the formation of the ’43 Group can be viewed as a project which constituted an anticolonial stance within the larger picture of national struggles for regaining political independence from the British colonizers, which gathered impetus in South Asia in the mid-twentieth century (Weerasinghe 2000: 5). The most significant achievement of the ’43 Group can be considered their successful attempts at rephrasing a selected number of modernist trends and artistic approaches which flourished in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, giving rise to a distinctively Sri Lankan modernist art. Of the members of the ’43 Group, George Keyt can be considered the most well-known Sri Lankan modernist, whose work combined a modernist idiom rooted in a “Cubism-like” pictorial language with orientalist themes, motifs, and moods. His works played a pivotal role in the popularization of modern art in Sri Lanka. If Keyt is to be considered the “Orientalist visionary” in the ’43 Group, then the works of Justin Deraniyagala and Ivan Peries represented the two extremes of expressionist trends of the ’43 Group. The intense and complex psychological dispositions portrayed in Deraniyagala’s canvases subtly explore and reveal the tragedy and irony of the human condition, while the symbolic and meditative landscapes of Ivan Peries suggest extreme tranquility and compassion.
1950s: Nationalism and Modernism
Parallel to the formation of the ’43 Group, there were other trends active in the Sri Lankan art scene during the mid-twentieth century. The ultra-nationalist discourse in art, which demanded a “pure” Sri Lankan/Asian art form untainted by Western influences, was one of the two major artistic forces. This trend can be considered the cultural and artistic expression of the nationalist politics of S. W. R. D. Bandaranayake.[3] The other important presence in the art scene was the artistic trend influenced by the Shantiniketan school of art founded by Rabindranath Tagore, which expressed a much broader sense of the idea of “nationality” and “modernity.” However much the exponents of both of these trends attempted to formulate a genuinely Sri Lankan artistic discourse, the basic parameters of their existence as artists and of their work were necessarily modernist and Western. They were inevitably the products of a political, social, and educational system introduced, nurtured, and administered by the Western colonial powers. At any rate they were also highly individualist artists in every sense, as were the artists of the ’43 Group, against whom they had pitted their artistic practices.
While most of the trends that emerged from the nationalist discourse of the 1950s are now forgotten, one remains active to date. It is the approach that looked at painting as illustrating poetry and poetical moods. Most of the exponents of this style were poets themselves. The earliest artist of this line was Ananda Samarkoon (1911–62), and it received a fresh lease of life in the hands of Mahagama Sekera (1929–76) in the 1960s and 1970s. Mahagama Sekera was a trained artist who received his education at the Government College of Art (currently the University of Fine and Performing Arts). He was better known as a highly acclaimed poet. His paintings could be considered accompaniments to his extremely lyrical poetic expressions. Currently this trend can be seen continued in Champani Devika’s (1961–) poetry-paintings, which she usually publishes in national papers.
1960s: Institutionalization of Modernist Art
Currently Sri Lanka has an entire university dedicated to the study of fine arts: the University of Fine and Performing Arts. This institution has a history that goes back to the late nineteenth century. It first came into being as a section in the Government Technical College during British rule in Sri Lanka, and as such the kind of artistic practices and aesthetics that it supported from its inception were formed after academic realism of the British art academies of the time.[4] The important artists who were associated with the art college in the early twentieth century were such academic realists as David Paynter (1900–75) and J. D. A. Perera (1897–1967). As such, the Government College of Art was not open to modernist art which was taking position in Sri Lanka’s art scene by the hands of the artists of the ’43 Group. It took a unique individual endowed with immense creative potential and a radical personality such as Stanley Abeysinghe (1914–95) to change the established academic realist art tradition of the Government College of Art to that of the modern. Abeysinghe institutionalized the radical and innovative achievements in art established by the ’43 Group in the 1940s and 1950s.
With the triumph of the modernist tradition in- and outside of academia, one can see the basic modernist language of art becoming “the way” to do art in Sri Lanka. Since then the modernist art vocabulary has made it possible for artistic personalities with different and opposing tempers to emerge, and they have enriched the modernist art scene in various ways.
The modernist art tradition of Sri Lanka has mainly been a scene of painters, not much of sculptors. The first modernist Sri Lankan sculptor of importance was Tissa Ranasinghe (1925–2019), who has rephrased modernist sculpture in relation to Sri Lankan/South Asian experiences since the 1960s. Ranasinghe’s figurative sculpture can be considered a three-dimensional expression of the painted visions of the ’43 Group. His influence can still be seen in contemporary Sri Lankan sculpture. There was hardly a figurative sculptor working in a modernist line after Ranasinghe who could exceed his vision and innovative approach. An exception may be Mahinda Wijesekera, who actually enriched what Ranasinghe accomplished in his work by adding a lyrical dimension to modernist sculpture. The next most important development in modernist sculpture can be seen in the non-figurative works of H. A. Karunaratne, who is a well established abstract painter as well.
1970s: Institutionalization of Abstract Art
As indicated above, the two decades spanning the late 1960s to the late 1980s experienced relatively less dynamism in art in comparison with the 1940s and 1950s, except for an important development that had far-reaching consequences in terms of method and style in painting. Up until the 1960s Sri Lankan modern painting was mostly a figurative one which evolved with inspirations absorbed from such major European schools as Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and other similar trends, except for an artist like George Claessen of the ’43 Group, who was both an abstractionist and a representational painter. This situation began to change in the 1960s with the entrance of the non-figurative tradition of painting into Sri Lankan modern art as a result of the works, ideas, and teachings of the painter and art teacher H. A. Karunaratne (born 1929). In other words, it was H. A. Karunaratne who established the sign of the New York School as the mark of excellence in art making in Sri Lankan painting.
Karunaratne, who had spent spells of art training in New York and Tokyo in the 1960s, was a lecturer in painting at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies (IAS) of the University of Kelaniya (currently the University of Fine and Performing Arts). This is the only art institution in the country which offers a degree-level education. Being an established teacher at the IAS, Karunaratne was in a privileged position to persuade a whole generation of younger artists to work within the ideas of abstraction and abstract expressionism.
1980s: Crisis in Paradise
In 1971 Sri Lanka experienced its first insurgency since regaining political independence from the British, led by a Marxist oriented political party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), whose constituency was composed mainly of Sinhala-Buddhist rural youth from the southern regions of the island. In many ways this uprising, which had its roots in the sufferings and frustrations of long neglected rural youth, and the resultant brutalities signaled the bloody decades ahead of Sri Lanka. The 1971 insurgency and the atrocities accompanying the combating of rural insurgents by the armed forces, likewise composed mainly of Sinhala-Buddhist individuals, revealed the social potential of Sinhala-Buddhist southern society for the tolerance and justification of violence within the parameters of partisan politics. It exposed the self-destructive potential of society in the south of Sri Lanka. The violent incidents and the sufferings rural youth had to undergo during the insurgency, as well as the socio-political and moral issues which surfaced in its wake did not find their way into mainstream art practice as the institutional tutelage of art was enamored with the idea of exploring the spiritual dimensions and sublime truths in art making.
However, by the late 1970s and in the early 1980s one could see signs of displeasure, frustration, and memories of violence appearing in the works of two artists: Nayananada Vijayakulatillake (1947–) and S. H. Sarath (born 1948). Of the two artists, Vijayakulatillake was an insurgent himself and consequently spent a term in jail. His art recorded his time in prison and his anger toward the armed forces. Sarath sarcastically commented in his drawings on various aspects of the establishment, which he held responsible for human rights violations on the one hand and for uncritical acceptance of consumer capitalism on the other. Works of both of these artists could not give rise to any new dimensions in art making as such, as both of them worked within a highly modernist discourse of art, and their work with interventionist tones remained within the narrow limits of “art as protest.”
The 1990s: Pluralism and “Paramodernism”
The decade of the 1990s was an exceptionally creative period for modernist art in Sri Lanka. During these years Sri Lankan art went beyond the cusp of high modernism and entered a phase charged with post- or late-modernist criticality.[5]
A whole new generation of artists equipped with a range of new ideas and concepts of art, themes for artistic investigation, and especially with an understanding of the idea of the artist as a political individual have come to dominate the art scene in Sri Lanka. What is obvious when looking at this outburst of artistic talent is that the artists of the new generation are making a major theoretical assault on almost all the established ideas and thoughts on art making in Sri Lanka. What is also important to note here is that most of the animators of this highpowered movement are a group of young men and women who were forced to spend their teenage years in a highly chaotic social and political environment in their rural villages and hometowns. These radically new, yet artfully interesting young men and women are attacking the established ideas of excellence in art from a consciousness formed within the habitus of rural periphery, by positioning their “bodies” and “lives” as the crux of the matter of art making, In other words, “small-town” Sri Lanka is impacting its mark on Colombo’s metropolitan art world.
In a way, most of the works of the artists who emerged in the 1990s seem to portray them as a group of people living with memories of violence, dispossession, and despair on the one hand, and as if they were casualties of the alluringly strange beauty and evasive nature of urban culture on the other hand. At the same time, the prime force that sustains their artistic activities, I would argue, is a struggle to convert the self-realization of their oppressed and marginalized position in society into a dynamism which allows them to surmount their despair and gain subsistence in the very society that “undesired” them in the recent past. In their artistic constructions they have transformed the frustrations, despair, and alienation ensuing from socio-political devastation and urban misimpression and chimera into ways and methods to become consummative and acknowledged in society.
The key feature of the art of the 1990s is its conscious effort to define art as an expression of “now” and “right here,” art and art making process as an expression of being contemporary. A majority of contemporary artists show a common conviction in their artistic efforts by necessarily placing themselves and their creative energies within the “current cultural moment” and its immediacy, and less frequently in the distant past. This necessity to be in the “current cultural moment” states a common idea held, consciously or unconsciously, by most contemporary artists: the refusal of a metaphysical narrative that couches a wish to be universal in a theological and trans-cultural sense (Weerasinghe 1998). In other words, this position negates the established conviction that a work of art is an enclosed entity with an objective self-existence.
This position has liberated them from two historical fetters: first from a tradition which was signified as “genuinely Sri Lankan” within the anticolonial and nation-building projects of the early and mid-twentieth century; and second from the confusing concept of art as “self” or “soul’s” expression, where “self” or “soul” are defined as an apolitical existence. These new ideological positions have been formulated within a formal body of artistic approaches and strategies where the sentiments and sensations of violence and frustration, the tensions and passions of consumer society, and the material/carnal and visual situations of the urban and rural middle class could be brought into the domain of high art and of contemporary affluent society. The art of the 1990s is an issues-driven art and an engagement with problems which are directly concerned with the “living reality” of society at large.
2000s: New directions—The Playfulness and Critique of Handmade Realities
If art in the 1990s made its presence felt through “irony-critique,” by the beginning of the first decade of the present century it is more involved with “playfulness-critique.”
Innovative art trends of the first years of the twenty-first century can be characterized by two important aspects. On the one hand they present a heightened sensitivity toward popular culture, consumerism, and tradition, and on the other hand they show a strong tendency toward making art in the manner of making craft objects. The idea of the “handmade” is a strong presence in contemporary art practice in Sri Lanka. For some of the younger contemporary artists making a work of art has become a process in which an “object of art” (as opposed to a “work of art”) shrouded in visual pleasure, curiosity, and surprise is being produced. The “object” thus created, while being capable of imparting visual pleasure, pushes the viewer into a realm where important issues pertaining to individuals and to contemporary Sri Lankan society at large are raised and confronted.
Conclusion
As one can see from the foregoing discussion, the artistic trends which developed in Sri Lanka since the 1990s provide a complex and wide-ranging repertoire. In the 1990s there was a critical move away from the asocial, taciturn, and aloof high modernist positions to socially committed and politically conscious approaches. As one can see today, this was a move which has caused a complete change in the way art is made and talked about. The theoretical basis, evolutionary history, and implicit or explicit conceptualization of current art practice defy description in terms of categories such as modernism or postmodernism. To say quite simply that it is “posttraditional” gives one breathing space. Nevertheless, this characterization is also misleading—as one can often see an underlying yearning for tradition, for an ideal lost, for roots in the past. Its immediate stylistic qualities have something in common with Euro- American modernism. At the same time, the critical stance on which most current artworks are constructed presents a postmodern aura. Just as the oxcart and the microchip jostle in the streets of Colombo—a postcolonial, ahistorical space in which history of technology is turned on its head—posttraditional, paramodern art practice addresses this confusing situation cheerfully, confidently, violently, with a sense of tragic irony.
References Cited
Bandaranayake, Senake
1996 Ivan Peries Paintings, 1938–88. Colombo: Tamarind Publications.
n.d. Sri Lankan Painting in the Twentieth Century. Unpublished manuscript.
George Keyt
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Kapur, Geeta
2000 “When Was Modernism in Indian Art,” In: When was Modernism. Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Dehli: Tulika Press), 297–324.
Sinha, Gayatri (ed.)
2003 Indian art: An Overview. New Delhi: Rupa & Co.
Weerasinghe, Jagath
1998 No Glory, Sarath Kumarasiri, Recent Works at Heritage Gallery [18–36 April 1998]. Colombo.
2000 Introduction to catalogue. In: Made in IAS: An Exhibition of Paintings, Sculpture and Installation Works by 16 Artists from the Institute of Aesthetic Studies of the University of Kelaniya, Gallery 706, Colombo, 11–20 July 2000 (Colombo: IAS), 3–5.
2002 “The Moments of Impact: The Art of the ’90s Trend in Sri Lanka,” In: Pooja Sood (ed), KHOJ 2001 International Artists’ Workshop (New Delhi: KHOJ International Artists’ Association), 85–88.
2005 “Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka,” In: Caroline Turner (ed.), Art and Social Change (Canberra: Pandanus Books), 180–193.
Weereratne, Neville
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[1] This essay has been heavily drawn from three of my previous essays on the same subject; see Weerasinghe 2000, 2002, and 2005.
[2] 2. Modernist art of the West in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is abundant with instances which show artists of one tradition taking or appropriating symbols, methods, or motifs from another tradition which they have come to face as a result of colonial expansions of the West. These instances of appropriations have in essence been gestures of defiant political thoughts and actions. The Impressionists’ appropriation of Japanese design motifs and perspectives, Gauguin’s involvement with Tahitian imageries, and the inspirations and influences artists such as Matisse and Picasso acquired from African art are just a few examples in point.
[3] S. W. R. D. Bandaranayke was the founding leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party who became the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka in 1956. This Oxford-educated gentleman with an aristocratic family background launched his political campaign based on acutely nationalist foundations, which could gather momentum among the Sinhala-Buddhist rural masses.
[4] The art section of the Government Technical College was later upgraded to the status of Government College of Art. In the late 1970s it was affiliated to the university system and was endowed with the title of Institute of Aesthetic Studies, and in 2005 it was turned into an independent university.
[5] The impulse for this change in modernist art in Sri Lanka in the 1990s is considered to have been initiated by the works and teachings of Jagath Weerasinghe. His 1992 exhibition Anxiety is now considered to have opened a decisively new space for Sri Lankan art by showing hitherto unchartered narrative possibilities within a modernist discourse. Weerasinghe was not alone in this venture, he worked along with three other important Sri Lankan artists: Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Kingsley Gunatillake, and Anoli Perera. Thenuwara’s Barellism works, which transported an everyday mundane object into the realm of art, and Anoli Perera’s work constructed upon a strong feminist criticality along with Weerasinghe’s work pushed Sri Lankan art over the limits of High Modernism into a new terrain, which provided a conducive ideological environment for the growth of the ’90s Trend.