TWO QUESTIONS ON INDIA 

What took you there? What are you taking back? 

Nikos Papastergiadis and Heather Rogers ask Peter Bevan  1996

NP: We would like to examine the relationship between the body of your work that begins at the time when you made your first visit to India and your shift from painting to sculpture.

Firstly, can you tell us about your motivation to go to India?

PB: There is some history to it. I remember when I was a student at Cheltenham for instance, referring to texts on Indian art, culture and philosophy; Coomaraswamy’s book “The Transformation of Nature in Ar”, for example. There seemed to be some relationship to the paintings I was doing, which were otherwise very much influenced by American abstract artists of that time. Much later, in Glasgow, and when my interest in sculpture was growing, I was thinking about travelling in connection with my work, looking for a new kind of stimulus, a new experience which might give some focus to my ambitions to make sculpture. A curiosity about India resurfaced.

NP. Did those new experiences, those possible “shocks” which you mentioned in a letter to me, emerge in your travels?

PB. Yes, they did. I had read about India before going and spoken to people who had been. They recommended many places of interest in terms of sculpture, but I also got dire warnings of both the social and economic conditions, the poverty, the caste system, and so on. I was well prepared, and in retrospect my experience there was not shocking – I was fascinated, mesmerised. Being there for three months, I went through all sorts of emotions, from elation to disgust, well-being to loneliness, but not shock. And I met generous and sympathetic people and I saw things with which I had a immediate empathy: - every-day objects, buildings, performance, ritual.

HR: Can you talk about the architecture that you saw in India and what impact that had on you?

PB: I was impressed by the scale of the architecture of Temple complexes, especially in South India, sometimes covering half a square mile and having one main and several smaller temples within their walls. Rather like a cathedral with its adjoining chapels, I suppose. But it wasn’t only that which impressed me, but the way these places were used.

Hindu worship is essentially a private act of puja, and is performed at all times of the day – whenever convenient – on the way to work; on the way home from shopping – so these temples were bustling with people, but not in the organised way of Christian congregational worship. The main temple at Madurai has a really cavernous interior, huge Victorian clocks, vendors stalls, rows of brightly-lit offices, a regular ringing of bells and a constant bustle of very purposeful activity. It really did remind me of a very busy railway station.

I witnessed one communal act of worship in the Shive Temple at Chidambaram which was conducted by priests in front of a small group of about 25 people. The ceremony was announced by the ringing of hand-bells, progressively louder and faster, leading to a crescendo, which continued throughout the puja with an insistent rhythm.

An older priest chanted above the din while a flurry of young priests rushed about the platform, breaking coconuts over the stone lingam, lighting a grey powder which burst into flame around it, clattering and banging with all sorts of instruments and utensils. In fact, without meaning to be offensive, the place looked like a kitchen. I was fascinated and the Hindu worshippers in the crowd were equally enthralled. At a certain point, two heavy iron doors were literally thrown open, revealing beyond, a small room glowing with the light of many oil lamps, and in the middle, a small effigy of Shiva, surrounded and illuminated - garlanded by fire. This was the inner sanctum; after about a minute, the doors were slammed shut, the ceremony was over; the bells stopped abruptly and the audience, having ‘witnessed’ were dismissed.

NP: You seem very fascinated by these activities, the mixture of materials from daily life into ritual practice is a powerful feature in your account, but how did the architecture structurally relate to these activities and what sort of impression did you gain from that?

PB: The architecture is designed in stages symbolising the move from the sensorial world to the spiritual, both laterally, in the way you enter the temple and move through interior spaces, and the vertical layers from the ground up. The subjects of the carvings decorating the outer surfaces also reflect these stages or states of being.

Generally the size of the interior spaces get progressively smaller, from grand entrances with large openings to smaller, more contained spaces. The inner sanctum itself was always deep inside the temple structure, usually without any source of light except that taken into it. It was also very small as though contact with the deity was reserved for few people and was deemed to be the most intimate and personal of acts.

NP: On your return to Britain how did you begin to come to terms with all these experiences of teeming combinations and visions of sublime symmetry?

PB: Well, one way was very practical, I had taken many hundreds of photographs, and to slowly develop, print and look into these was in itself an act of reflection and re-evaluation.

HR: It seems that some of the photographs you took operate in terms of the translation that can happen in photography of architectural information into sculptural forms, were these photographs influential?

PB: Many of them do seem no more that ‘studies’ of various forms of architecture and sculpture, and I don’t regard them as being directly related to my sculptural activity. For instance, I have many photographs of really fine figurative carvings from temple walls, and of the exquisite ‘naturalistic’ bronzes of the Chola period In Tamil Nadu.

HR: Were the photographs just ‘neutral’ documents of your encounters?

PB: Not all of them, some for various reasons held other meanings for me, which I have only gradually begun to understand. I remembered quite often taking a lot of trouble to get photographs of temples from a distance and also trying to record the environment around the temple and the way one approached, or indeed was led to it. Alongside these were images of very small objects, or discarded fragments of demolished temple buildings. These very often echoed the architecture, but were also discrete sculptural forms themselves.

NP: It seems to me that there are a number of persistent themes in your work and that in some ways the trip to India broadened the scope of those themes, certainly the work that follows from it gives an indication of this. The first thing that comes to mind from the paintings in the period of the mid-eighties is the sense of pain and separation, and also the space between desire and repulsion, or to put it more precisely, the pain created by absence of mutual love. In the paintings, this is addressed in a very personal way and they have very direct messages about the inability to communicate and develop close contact. Would it be fair to say that on your return from India these themes, although still very personally important to you, become depersonalised as well and become developed in a sense slightly more abstract and this, perhaps, returns us to your earlier paintings which were, as you said, grappling with the influences of Rothko and early American expressionists?

PB: Yes, I agree with you. I became aware of it when I started to make sculpture on a bigger scale and began. To draw upon a stronger sense of independence – maybe the trip to India contributed to this. But perhaps there’s another factor involved; being trained as a painter I had little experience of using sculptural materials. I had to learn as I went along and couldn’t be as immediate and direct as I had been in painting. Having a limited working knowledge of materials and machinery, meant that I couldn’t go into a piece knowing exactly what was possible. It was perhaps another way in which the work became more depersonalised and less autobiographical.

HR: It seems like it shifted from being so specifically about a love relationship between two people to being more about the relationship with the self and other, as well as dealing with the broader idea of the self. While not necessarily functioning as an illustration of that, your sculpture was dealing with the same issues through an abstracted singular form.

PB: I was critical of the last body of paintings I did (before committing myself to sculpture in 1990, and after returning from India because they seemed to be confined to illustrating states of being. For me, they became less compelling and less rewarding to make.

NP: In a way they were explaining how you were feeling at the time, whereas it seems to me that the sculptures aren’t necessarily addressing directly your particular feeling, or maybe they are but they are not simply stopping there. Perhaps one of the ways in which the boldness is elaborated is through the use of materials that you started to work with and how you tried to integrate certain materials to particular ideas?

PB: As I’m not experienced in making sculpture I came to the choice of materials with a kind of enquiry. How do I choose which materials to use? I had to ask: What does that medium signify to me? I started to think about how materials relate to each other, and to choose materials which were, in themselves, appropriate to the ideas I was constructing.

Stone is generally older than wood, it has the associations of longevity; grand architecture – edifices of establishment. Wood is much more temporal; and architectural material, but lighter; an adjunct to the body, like interior fittings, furniture, etc. Clay is highly malleable, it can be used like a skin to make hollow forms and has its own associations with vessels, handling and touching; an intimacy with the body.

NP: Can you give us examples of how you’ve used these materials to develop different emotional and conceptual states in your own work?

PB: “FATHER – A TRINITY”, (which was built in 1990-91 for the Scottish Sculpture Open 6 Exhibition and specifically designed for the site at Kildrummy Castle, Aberdeenshire). It is one piece of work consisting of three related elements, each made out of different materials. The largest element BASTION, is made out of chipboard – a very modern material, reconstituted wood, in fact, not the ‘real’ thing. It has built-in ephemerality, it will not last unless it is very carefully protected and conserved. BASTION, is representative of an established concept of fatherhood, in the middle age if you will, at the height of power. It was built as a very robust and complacently seated figure occupying the highest ground on the site; proclaiming that occupancy, and although seated, has implied potential for action of defence. It has this appearance but it’s made out of a material which simply won’t last. The second element PETARD; is a War machine designed for blowing up doorways, thus gaining penetration as to form a seriously aggressive threat to BASTION… However, this posturing is subverted through the use of the stone with its associative reading as a sarcophagus. Even if PETARD succeeds in usurping the dominant role of BASTION, it contains the implication of its own eventual demise.

The third element, MEMORIAL, is a small seated figure carved in smooth white marble; set up on a wooden pedestal at some distance from the imminent conflagration of the other two. I see it as essentially a third aspect of fatherhood; the wisdom or indeed, the weakness of old age, ignoring the conflict, ‘turning a blind eye’.

HR: Can you talk about the relationship of the plinths and the scaffolding you sue with your sculptures?

PB: I’d stared to make small clay figures before going to India, and exhibited a few of them with some drawings which were in fact like proposals for sculpture. If course, in the drawings you can ‘place’ the sculpture in whatever context you wish, and I remember Dhruva Mistry commenting that the drawings worked better because these contexts complemented the sculptures. In contrast, the actual ceramic pieces sat on undistinguished, white gallery plinths (made incidentally of chipboard. These were quite unrelated to the works and it was then that I realised how important context was, and began to consider exactly how the sculpture should be encountered in the gallery. If indeed, the sculpture needed a ‘plinth’ it should be specifically designed and thereby become part of the sculpture, acting in some cases like an intermediary form between the piece and the gallery context.

HR: It seems to me that this links up the use of architecture in your work; the plinth as a supporting structure but in fact part of the sculpture itself. Could you talk about the role you see architecture playing in these pieces?

PB: What I saw in Indian Temples was sculpture essentially built into the function of the architecture, even if it was free-standing it played a defining role in the way one approached puja. You encountered these forms in a specific way. The scaffolding in GAZEBO is a reference to architecture. The figure is a place in which you can stand, and it is clad with scaffolding-like structure, to trigger a thinking about the figure as a piece of architecture.

NP: In some cases the plinth and sculpture complement each other and this returns us to the idea of the gap between the self and the idealised other, the beloved one. It is clear that the plinth for WALK, which paradoxically has a very jagged edge, points to the precariousness of this relationship between identity and the self. Insecurity precisely where there should be security. In many of these sculptures, and this is where I think they move beyond the earlier paintings, you always try to project a dual face to an image. You show love and pain, security and insecurity, you show the home as a place of refuge and as a place of potential imprisonment. This duplicity of possibilities in any situation can always be exposed in the sculpture in two ways; both from its exterior and its interior. Could you talk about this ambivalence that you start to explore in the sculptures, for it now strikes me that this is an attempt to create a maternal space even as you’re dealing with questions of paternity?

PB: I’m very aware that the gist in many of the works is a sort of dichotomy. There’s a twist in almost all the pieces which talks about an opposite for a weakness, alongside the appearance of strength. It’s as though one can’t be wholly positive or wholly negative, there’s always the other side of the coin.

NP: Have you been influenced by Indian philosophy at all in that direction?

PB: It could be, although I don’t profess to have studied it intensely. I respond to the importance in Indian philosophy of equal and opposite. For example, Shiva is the god of destruction but also the god of dance, a joyous, life-enhancing thing. I think there is a connection although it’s not a conscious connection; these contradictions are universal.

HR: You’re going to India with drawings and plans of existing sculpture. What do you think about the sculptor without his sculptures? We have so far drawn several analogies with architecture, and parts of your exhibition could be compared to an architect’s plans which are meant to fully communicate a structure before it has even been built. How do you feel about that?

PB: If you had asked me this a few months ago, I would have said you can’t experience the sculpture without bumping into it and there’s obvious truth in this. But I became interested in the idea of how far drawings, photographs and writings can communicate something of the ‘nature’ of three-dimensional work.

There will be a range of different kinds of drawing represented in the exhibition; drawings generating ideas; drawings made to solve constructional problems; drawings as proposals for finished work. There will also be photographic documentation of pieces on site or in exhibition, as well as images of working processes. I’m also putting in photographs which I hope may reveal aspects and qualities of the sculpture more intimately and subjectively.

What will not be present, of course, is the physical tactile experience, but the show will be another way of encountering the work – through a multi-layered experience of different modes of re-representation.

HR: Do you feel that people who come to see the show will walk away feeling as though they’ve seen an illustration of the works as they exist or is the show another metaphor altogether?

PB: I hope it won’t simply illustrate seven years of sculpture, although there would be some success if the viewer came away with a broad appreciation of the work in terms of its generation and the ideas present in it. Rather, I’m excited by the prospect of taking something ‘back’ to India and what may be learnt from that. I hope that all the various elements come together (including this publication) and will construct a coherent context for perceiving the work there, and a new context from which to review the sculptures here.

January 1996