Peter Bevan – Sculpture: 1989 – 1997

Exhibition, Glasgow School of Art: 29 July – 30 August 1997

Some thoughts on two visits to India, 1989 and 1996

 On thinking about these visits in order to write about this exhibition, I began by asking the question, “Why did I want to go there?”. As is quite often the way with such direct questions, I couldn’t find an immediately succinct answer. So, I went on to ask two further, more general questions to try to construct a plausible reply for myself. As a visual artist, “ Why travel to other very different cultures?”, and “What does one do with the experience on return?”.

There are many examples of artists from the past whose work was significantly influenced by extensive foreign travel, such as Delacroix’s discovery of the “exotic” in North Africa and Gaugin’s idealisation of the society and people, especially women, of Melanesia. Considering such precedents and others more recent to India, like Stephen Cox and Anthony Gormley, I could answer firstly that to travel is to seek and experience of “otherness”, to confront the “other”, to follow unfamiliar trains of thought, to pursue goals defined by different philosophy or religion, to learn from and appreciate that which is personally and culturally “foreign”.

However, there are aspects to these ideas which, for me, raise a number of difficult issues too easily submerged in over- simplification. These might be loosely described  as “aesthetic colonialism” implying concepts of cultural superiority (that of the “west” over the “east”) and obscuring a somnolent racism. It is true to say that such “borrowings” from other cultures can no longer be viewed as merely the result of innocent curiosity or “natural empathy”, since they expose the often questionable presumptions and assumptions of both the traveller and the host. Writers and thinkers more eloquent than I, such as Edward Said and Rasheed Araeen, are addressing , elsewhere, these problems from within the present post-colonial context.

But I was conscious of these difficulties on my first visit to India and therefore in the work I made on return to Scotland tried to avoid direct or “stylistically” derivative forms. I feared that in some way this would be an inconsiderate and shallow appropriation or, at worst, a kind of theft. In fact it was the tactility and usage of functional objects and the expressive and symbolic structure of architecture which impressed me most and has remained with me, indeed expanding like a reservoir of ideas, as it were, filling.

However in retrospect, I do acknowledge an implicit strategy of self-discovery in that visit. It was an attempt to build or more correctly repair, a sense of self, somewhat damaged by unhappy experience paradoxically, as it may be, through the challenge of confronting the “other”.

But as well as an ontological quest, I also admit to an element of romanticisation of India at that time, almost certainly traceable to the exposure it received in British pop culture of the late 1960’s when I was an impressionable art student. Subsequent personal developments in my life, which are not relevant to these notes, allowed some 20 years to pass before I actually made the trip! It was then, and is perhaps now, my persistent unease and dissatisfaction with aspects of British culture which may stimulate a romanticisation and mythification of an “other”. This is not a new phenomenon in the west as we have seen, but may be particularly potent this century reflecting a reaction against the experience of a dehumanising and fragmented modern life. The perception of other societies and cultures as somehow discrete and happily unified entities is perhaps symptomatic of a loss, or an inability to construct, a sense of wholeness.

Thus it was from two rather negative positions that I first travelled to India in 1989, but the second visit in 1996 was from an entirely different perspective. In the seven intervening years I have tried to develop some sense of a sculptural language, which for me correlates a variety of compelling concerns, ie. Subjectivity, objectness, function, architecture, context and material. Some of these elements do have a specific resource in my experience of India, but my own culture and its history is equally the source.

Consequently it was with some confidence, rather than a sense of weakness, that I proposed to take something back to India, and in so doing to try to acknowledge what I had received. I made an exhibition of drawings and photographs of the sculptural work since 1989, which I hoped would demonstrate a little learning from that culture significantly related to my own, mediated through a subjective but hopefully coherent visual language. In other respects too, the second trip had positive and workmanlike purposes. On a Teacher Exchange Programme there are specific commitments to prepare for and to deliver and, in this case, an exhibition to research and make prior to the visit and to present whilst there.

With such a different mind-set, or stronger sense of self, it is perhaps not surprising to return to Scotland with quite different perceptions. My impressions in 1996 were of global similarity rather than a distinct “otherness”. Indeed form the present perspective of a globally integrated economy and communications system, it is certain that no culture can remain untouched or uninfluenced. The palpable evidence of global capitalism, especially in the metropolis of Bombay, gave me cause to re-think the duality and oppositional implications of “western” and “eastern” cultures. But, whilst retaining an innately sceptical view of globalisation of any kind, I could begin to think with some conviction in the positive potential for the “Indianisation” of this new development from western culture rather than the habitually voiced concern over the vice-versa.

Isn’t Indian history credited with, or more accurately, Hindu culture, characterised by its ability to absorb “foreign” imports or indeed invasions with little loss to its integrity?

With these thoughts in mind, I return to the question of “What do I do with the experience on return?”, and to take notice of a distinct change over eight years from a concern for self-development to a concern for our cultural evolution, from the ontogenetic to the phylogenetic. It may be pertinent to refer briefly to the sculptures illustrated as testimony to this observation. Whilst in India in 1996, I made three terracotta pieces called “Wealth, Industry and Commerce: The Three Talents”, trying to acknowledge with some irony the forces of free-market capitalism currently being embraced with such optimism in so-called Third World countries. These sculptures were not placed squarely in an Indian context but had Indian references through some of the forms used. The second version of the same title, made in Glasgow in 1997 and the centre piece for this exhibition, reuses these forms but contexturalises them confidently astride the apex of a flower-head. The flower-head makes connections with the capital of a column and the lotus of Indian iconography but also proposes an analogy between the flower and the earth.

Peter Bevan

June 1997