What happens when a person immersed in TV news and ‘coffeeshop politics’ transfers his thoughts and feelings into art?
Conditional Love, an exhibition of “painted stories” by Anurendra Jegadeva is the artist’s eighth solo exhibition (since 1992) and perhaps his boldest venture into the realm of politics.
A self-described “arm chair commentator” and “coffeeshop activist”, he is often immersed in his “favourite muzak” of TV news channels.
No Parking hints at the event which sparked off the Hindraf phenomenon.
Thus it’s no surprise to see his scathing four-piece set of War Brides – featuring women with white wedding dresses jarringly juxtaposed against the raw blackness of petroleum extraction – with vicious, demon-like teeth protruding from their lips.
I immediately thought of O.I.L – Operation Iraqi “Liberation” (oh sorry, they call it Operation Iraqi Freedom actually), where, despite the layers of “white” disguises, the fangs of the war-power nexus are painfully obvious.
More strikingly, Anurendra may be making Malaysian artistic history as he captures glimpses of the tumult behind the political tsunami of March 2008.
In Unconditional I & II, he compares a sombre Datin Seri Wan Azizah and an equally doleful Federal Reserve Unit (FRU) riot policeman – who has “stuff” dripping from inside his red helmet. Is that his sweaty conscience? And how “unconditional” is our love for the country amidst all this?
Anurendra maintains that he “is not a history painter nor some social activist”. However he admits, “Like everybody else I am a creature of my history, my community... my generation. As such I am responding, quite naturally without any agendas, to the issues that affect me most. The works are certainly political. But they are also love stories?”
This dual characteristic is evident when he depicts an Indian family at the Batu Caves Hindu temple, wooed by the election banners of two political parties – both the MIC and PAS. Yet, despite the courtship, the title says it all: We Dance Alone.
To whom shall the Malaysian-Indians betroth themselves? For is love, especially in elections, not quintessentially “conditional”? Might the best solution not be, as psychologists always recommend, a healthy – and unconditional – self-love; where the people stand up for their own interests?
The Secret of Life celebrates not intense, starry-eyed love but a more durable version that lasts for decades.
His No Parking is even bolder, showing a pensive priest with a broken Ganesha deity while a steamroller and black smoke lurk in the background. I could not help recalling what an English-speaking upper-class Indian grandmother once told me, “I used to think that these Hindraf fellas were ruffians. Until I saw the VCD that was going round. When I saw the broken Ganesha from the Shah Alam temple, I understood.”
Anurendra is “curious” as to why many Malaysian artists are fine with being critical about foreign issues – American imperialism, the Iraq war, the environment etc – yet “when it is closer to home, people tend to be not so comfortable and conveniently leave it out.”
He adds, “I would like to think that the problems of Indians in Malaysia should be seen not as an Indian or Hindu issue but a human one.”
Looking at his five paintings of pensive Indians reading Letters from Home, I had initially thought they were dwelling on the loneliness of immigrants. But Anurendra clarifies that the work actually reflects the Hindraf Five (leaders detained under the ISA): “I don’t pretend to have solutions but detention of any kind is hard on the people around them.”
The poet/writer Eddin Khoo, described all this, in the exhibition essay, as “the transformation of Anurendra from presenter of lyrical autobiography to painter of politics.”
But politics is just one side of the 20 works on show, for Anurendra still evinces much of his old lyrical, even sentimental style.
There are the plain, undemanding comforts of a Sikh night-time jaga (watchman) on his charpoy bed in The Space Between, a title suggesting the shop’s five-foot way where he would sleep (in the old days).
Anurendra goes whimsical in Remembering the Chithambaram (the ship that used to connect Penang to India in the 1960s before it was destroyed in a fire), and nostalgic in Good Year for the Roses, an obituary-cum-tribute to the Alleycats singer, Loga (Loganathan Arumugam).
The Secret of Life features an elderly couple (the artist’s parents actually) looking at each other not with star-crossed young lovers eyes but with the practicality of two long-shared lives amidst a mosaic-like heart-shaped radiance. “Compromise” whispers a parrot above them.
War Brides, one of four in a series, shows the hypocrisy of the Iraq War.
And of course, there is some cheeky humour too. The Blueprint Artist Book I painted on 60 zigzag folder pages plays with ideas of macho-ness and hair: Indians with Afros, impossibly hirsute male Balinese dancers and the ultimate “hairy guy” - a gorilla. But what about the hairless Captain America? Or the bald Mahatma Gandhi?
Finally there is religion. Simple, unsullied (unconditional perhaps?) devotion is evident as Morris and Gertrude go to Church. Yet in For the Love of God I, II & III, guns are carried by three people – a Taliban type, a saffron-robed monk and a modern soldier – along with what they supposedly “worship”: symbols of Islam, Buddhism and consumerism (an iPod!)
Still, the latter is a far milder critique of religious hypocrisy than say his Militant Monks (series of 2001) who carried machine guns – reflecting how (a minority of) Sri Lankan monks had even demonstrated against the peace agreement with the Tamil Tigers at that time as it might jeopardise the primacy or “ketuanan” of “Buddhist Sinhala civilisation”.
Anurendra suggests we should “lighten up” on religion. From the front, his Formation pieces show Jesus painted on wood planers where the cross handles form a crucifix. But peek at the side, and there are whimsical fish and even “Laughing Cow” cheese wrappers. So besides – literally – our “planes” of religious existence, can we loosen up and smile a bit?
All in all, Conditional Love suggests that, whether it’s politics, family, pop culture or religion, “love” does indeed have many conditions.