Raqib Shaw: Paradise Lost

Walking through Raqib Shaws exhibition, Paradise Lost at the Pace gallery in New York, is to conceptually weave through John Miltons Paradise Lost, through the sylvan frame and into the aftermath. The 60 ft painting Paradise Lost displayed on its own, is from afar, incredibly detailed while from up close it achieves what Homi Bhabha has previously termed as a vibration of the picture frame1 on a seemingly epic scale. Homi Bhabhas essay, An Art of Exquisite Anxiety, posits dialectic between flatness and figuration as the space where the exquisite anxiety of the art of Raqib Shaw is to be found. Bhabha defines flatness as tends(ing) towards abstraction and void space, whereas figuration opens up the possibility of narration and symbolism in the process of representationShaws highly worked surfaces vividly display the tension between flatness and volume. His painted objects are enameled and gilded, and assume an almost sculptural presence as they precariously rise above the surface of the painting, only to be eventually re-absorbed into the flat picture plane.2 Paradise Lost (2001-2013) provides a narrative that takes the protagonist a Moon Howler with the head of a cat, crowned with Queen Elizabeth IIs crown and shod in yellow and green Nike high-tops through a scene that includes cannibalistic baboons, bears and cheetahs hunting deceptively camouflaged blue deer, blue swallows cascading upwards into a lightning sky and at the end, a checkerboard floor collapsing under the protagonists feet/hooves. In Miltons Paradise Lost it could be argued that The Tree of Knowledge suggests a tempered use of knowledge, which when misused results in the corruption of mans nature. In Shaws Paradise Lost the misuse of knowledge spreads to nature and is represented in extremis knowledge and nature as the object of consumption and as witness - which recalls the sylvan scene from Miltons Paradise Lost as well as T.S.Elliots The Waste Land. Elliot references Miltons Paradise Lost, in A Game of Chess.

Above the antique mantel was displayed As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice

And still she cried, and still the world pursues. Jug Jug to dirty ears.3 It could be argued that Elliot implies the witness of nature the forest where the rape of Philomel took place - as silent witness to the violent act, while the voice of the nightingale is seemingly communicating that witness. Shaw in contrast presents a sylvan scene where the culpability of nature is not only in witness but also in action and in participation. The use of Man- beasts and hybrid bodies (horse, cat, man) is indicative of the collapsed distinctions between one species and another, and while Bhabhas analysis of the juxtaposition of the flatness of the picture frame with the details of figuration applies, it does so entirely in the foreground both structurally and conceptually. In Shaws next works The Disambiguation of the Myth of the Last Shinobi, Twilight Painting I, Twilight Painting II, Collapse of the Cloud Kingdom I PARADISE LOST II, Arrival of the Ram King PARADISE LOST II, Coin Thrower PARADISE LOST II, Collapse of the Cloud Kingdom II PARADISE LOST II, Horse Catcher PARADISE LOST II structural edifices crumble from above while checkerboard floors crumble below. The background suggests a skybox space a void space used in the construction of space in video games that uses the illusion of the objects in the distance in order to pictorially suggest a larger space but which cannot be occupied or affected by any action on part of the protagonists in the video game. This skybox background can be glimpsed at through the crumbling floors. In effect this serves to suspend the entirety of the action within this skybox echoing the shift in scene from Paradise Losts pictorially grounded narrative to the sky bound cities of the Cloud Kingdom. The checkerboard floor suggests Elliots Chess Game, a stand in for the moves in a sexual game as well as a representation of the board upon which Shaws protagonists, indivisible into either victims or oppressors play out their own power games. Conceptually, this suspension of the action is also a suspension of the narrative element, which suggests that these works are caught in a moment of capture. The absence of flowers and foliage in all but the Twilight Painting I & II, additionally underlines a departure from anchorage to the frame and from Paradise Losts garden. It is only in Paradise Lost, that the mise-en-scene is primarily narrative in its telling from the shifting skies to the movement of the protagonist from a cliff top, to hilltop to kneeling amid snakes to swinging bound through cherry trees to in the end a moment of suspension and while Shaws earlier work evokes in distance the tension between flatness and figuration4 these are more panoramic in scale and concept. Of the works on paper Absence of God Synopsis, Paradise Lost Synopsis, Garden of Earthly Delights Synopsis function as miniature versions of previous works of the same titles with a few variations in some of the elements. Initiations at Xanadu (of Beasts & Super Beasts) and Doomsday at Xanadu (...of Beasts & Super Beasts) elaborate on remains Xanadu, the capital of Kubla Khans empire in China, where beasts and super beasts initiate the takeover of the ruins of Xanadu and progress into the halls of Xanadu.

The painting, St. Sebastian of the Poppies is the most overtly sexual work in the exhibition. Although the painting suspends the scene in the sky as in the later works, it serves to suggest that the action in St Sebastian of the Poppies is taking place in heaven. It also departs from the last five works as it contains flowers, in this case, poppies. The art historian Norman Rosenthal suggests in his essay, Raqib Shaw: After Us the Savage God, The petals of poppies are in anything surely more fragile than those of roses. It is the flower most associated both with blood and hallucination. Once more the mind, as we contemplate Shaws imagery, reenters the imaginings of Coleridge, as well as of his friend Thomas DeQuinceys classical account of the pleasures and pains of opium in Confessions of an English Opium Eater.5 In St Sebastian of the Poppies, Shaw tightly draws several influences together; the cherubs hovering and attacking St Sebastian recall Satan disguised seducing Eve in Paradise Lost, St Sebastian as homoerotic imagery and poppies and opium as gateways to knowledge and points of access. As a subversion of both the gender politics of Paradise Lost and of knowledge, St Sebastian is the closest Shaw comes to, to making social commentary. Two essays bookend Shaws work. Art historian Norman Rosenthal in his essay Raqib Shaw: After Us the Savage God, frames Shaws work as a subjective cultural project6, whose sense of historic displacement and personal alienation permits him his own cosmology of luxury and pained excess. Rosenthal asks, Who else today is trying to make truly contemporary transformations of lost cultural worlds7 In answer he suggests a number of references that Shaw uses from Indian and Persian miniatures, Hokusais drawings of Ninja warriors, Ancient Rome, the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Marquis De Sade and Thomas DeQuincey. He goes on to remark on the use of these references, they demand attention; on account of their command of cultural references that traverse easily from East to West: from the exotic gardens of Kashmir, to the memories that lie imprisoned in the great museums of the Western world. Furthermore, it is these fluid movements of memory that allow for Raqib Shaws fantastical transformations and metamorphoses, which reveal new perspectives of aesthetic depictions of subjective realities8 While Rosenthal situates aesthetic considerations as personal-poetic truths there is in Shaws paintings no questioning of the source of cultural memory or its conditional perspectives as taken from poetry, literature and art that form the transformation and metamorphosis in Shaws work. While Rosenthal acknowledges the personal cosmology and subjective nature of Shaws choice of influences, there is no consequent acknowledgement of the subjectivities of the influences themselves. That ground is left unturned which results in a surface level interaction and engagement between and with these influences. Additionally, there is very little acknowledgement of the colonial aspects of these influences, in particular the man-beast protagonists, the politics of opium, or even a nuanced or critical undertaking of the Ramayana or the Vedas. Suggestive perhaps is the juxtaposition of crumbling clearly Western architecture amid which the exotic other subject plays. While Rosenthal does make a claim for a political dimension when he suggests that, Nevertheless, in his own way, Shaws vision is not without its own strong political dimensionthat

political dimension is intertwined in visions of ever-impeding disasters which underlie the artists world of staggering excess and beauty, here specifically focused on flowers, blossoms and vegetal growth. It is furthermore a beauty destined to be eaten up or to wither into oblivion.9 He does so in aesthetic terms thus negating the use of influences in any other manner except as aesthetic choices. These influences carry only the weight of aesthetic considerations, and in fact do not adequately reference their own historical or political formations; they do not travel or echo outside the cosmos that Shaw builds for them, effectively suspending themselves within just that frame. Rosenthal further writes, the beauty of Shaws paintings, however, separated they are from the inevitability of the reality of decay, allow the artist and his viewers the illusion of permanence and inviolability.10 echoing the nightingales song in Elliots The Waste Land, which while musically beautiful, serves as a witness to an act of violence, suggesting neither indifference nor silence in the act of witness, but rather only a rebounding loop of aesthetics suspended and separated from the outside by inadequate/incomplete translation. Homi Bhabhas essay, An Art of Exquisite Anxiety, posits a dialectic between flatness and figuration as the space where the exquisite anxiety of the art of Raqib Shaw11 is to be found. Bhabha proposes a second underlying dynamic in the relation between medium and meaning or form and value. Lastly, Bhabha suggests that, cultural transmission or translation12 is crucial to Shaws work. He writes, the style of cultural hybridity seen in the work of Shaw (and other diasporic artists) is a revisionary art practice that opens up new aesthetic possibilities in the relation between medium and meaning or form and value. He elaborates this relation between the aesthetic and its use by the example of the formal construction of embroidery on Kashmiri Shawls that leaves unworked space in the center, suggesting this as a signifier of loss, or lost homeland, he writes, it is interesting to see how the undeveloped or unworked space at the center of a vast variety of Kashmiri Shawls illustrated in the notebooks (these are Shaws notebooks he references) corresponds to the relatively empty center the lost homeland, the memory of absence - that hovers at the heart of his landscapes in Absence of God IVThe Blind Butterfly Catcher (2008) and the Absence of God VI. The effect of this contrast between figure and void is a certain agitated movement (or vibration) of the picture plane itself.13 However, cultural translation and transmission in this context is conditional on the reading of the specific works Bhabha cites above. In the Paradise Lost exhibition, this vibration of the picture plane does not occupy the same role as it does in those works. In these works - The Disambiguation of the Myth of the Last Shinobi, Twilight Painting I, Twilight Painting II, Collapse of the Cloud Kingdom I PARADISE LOST II, Arrival of the Ram King PARADISE LOST II, Coin Thrower PARADISE LOST II, Collapse of the Cloud Kingdom II PARADISE LOST II, Horse Catcher PARADISE LOST II the foreground is held as separated from the background even as the latter can be seen from under the crumbling floors that figure in these works. This suspends, as has been argued in the beginning of this essay, the action as existing within a frame where the content does not impede or affect the background. There is a deliberate pictorial distinction made between form and content. While the

tension that Bhabha suggests does exist (in the works on paper for example) it does not translate at the same pictorial scale that Bhabha has previously suggested. Instead the pictorial distance applied in the work functions to create a distinction between its center and horizon. Cultural translation in this regard fails to move beyond the foreground, even as Kashmiri carpets are slung across horses bodies or over collapsing balustrades they are objects within the picture and the content and do not act as mediators/link between form and cultural content. This is the point at which cultural translation or transmission stops, and Shaws influences remain on the surface and are unable to carry their weight epistemological, historical or political- beyond the surface use that they are put to. Without an acknowledgement of the political and historical dimensions the vibration of the picture plane remains confined to the surface. One of Shaws interviews terms his work as multicultural, but in this sense any multicultural engagement without depth in understanding and cross-cultural use-value and use-consequence begets the question; What is the responsibility of the artist, if any, in a period when information, culture and access to the same is ubiquitous, to the historical, epistemological, political and social history of references or influences used in their work even as the historical precedents and contexts themselves are subject to revision, in order to create new meaning? The answer is highly subjective, and given that Shaw has made no claim thus far to socio-political considerations, perhaps the question does not apply to Shaws works. But be that as it may, the eschewing of socio- political considerations while constructing falling empires, marauding man-beasts, and tying together references such as Hans Holbein, Hokusai, Persian miniatures, carpets and jewellery, the Vedas, Oscar Wilde, Sufi Music, Mughal and Tanjore Painting, and many more, affords Shaw the claim to neutral ground, where cultural hybridity functions in a weightless pictorial space. In this Shaws work remains confined to the surface.

Renuka Sawhney December 2013, New York.

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Homi K. Bhabha, 'An Art of Exquisite Anxiety', Absence of God (White Cube, London and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna 2009) 2 ibid 3 The Waste Land and Other Poems, T.S. Elliot; Edited by Frank Kermode, 1998 4 Homi K. Bhabha, 'An Art of Exquisite Anxiety', Absence of God (White Cube, London and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna 2009) 5 Rosenthal, Norman, Raqib Shaw: After Us the Savage God, Raqib Shaw, Paradise Lost, Pace Gallery, 2013 6 ibid 7 ibid 8 ibid

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ibid ibid 11 Homi K. Bhabha, 'An Art of Exquisite Anxiety', Absence of God (White Cube, London and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna 2009) 12 ibid 13 ibid!
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