The College of Fine Arts has a unique place in Indian art history as the origin point of a short-lived movement that still produces reverberations once in a while – the radical arts movement.
Fuelled by post-Emergency political fervour, a group of students from the college set out to produce a proletarian art movement that eschewed the existing visual styles.
The flames of rebellion were lighted by K.P. Krishnakumar, a student of the college in the 1970s, then practising his art in Baroda. Inspired by his call for change, college students Alexander, Hareendran, C.K. Rajan, Pradeep, and Jyothi Basu organised a camp among the fisherfolk of Vettukad with the help of a few liberation theology activists.
New avenues
Living with the fishing families for weeks and teaching them art through slideshows and then by making them the subject of their work in various mediums, the group opened new avenues in people’s art. These young artists then came together with other seniors from the college such as Alex Mathew, Pushkin E.H., K.M. Madhusudhan, K. Prabhakaran, and the sole non-Malayali Anita Dube to form the Indian Radical Painters and Sculptors’ Association in 1987.
Krishnakumar penned the group’s manifesto along with Anita Dube. It was a time of student protests against the policies of the government and in the college that of the administration, and it was all reflected in their programme. They questioned even the ‘retrogressive’ sensibilities of the Lalit Kala Akademi.
“The lack of guidance and the disruption of regular teaching had left us in search of possibilities through reading, looking, thinking, and interacting with each other. The discovery of great figures of world art who have meaningfully responded to their respective socio-political situations gave scope for us to expand our visual sensibilities. It is on the basis of this exposure to world art that our attitude against decadence in art and resistance to it began to evolve,” says the manifesto.
Their ‘Questions and dialogues’ exhibition at the Kozhikode Town Hall was marked by public participation and shook the art world. At the Victoria Terminus railway station in Mumbai, they protested against the art auction planned by Sotheby’s in 1987, and campaigned against crass commercialisation.
But just when they were on the rise, they were cut short by internal contradictions and the untimely death of Krishnakumar at the age of 30. He committed suicide during an artists’ camp in 1989.
At the Kochi Muziris Biennale in 2012, the old radicals came together to remember their fallen comrade. Two of his sculptures were also put on display at the Durbar Hall, but only a few knew the tragic story behind it.
source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Thiruvananthapuram / by S. R. Praveen / Thiruvananthapuram – July 16th, 2014