Its Time Has Come: Examining Ceramic Practice at a Crucial Moment of Transition

NANCY ADAJANIA

In this paper, Nancy Adajania explores the conceptual nuances of time – specifically timeliness and post-apocalyptic time – along with related propositions of pedagogy and play, sociality, political relevance and a speculative approach to history in relation to the ceramic practices of two artists: Madhvi Subrahmanian and Sahej Rahal; the former a trained ceramicist and the latter a painter and performance artist who has taught himself the art of making unfired clay sculptures.

Nancy begins with a meditation on the social history of time in the Indian context by referring to chaakri – the Bengali term for a salaried job in the lower ranks of the colonial administrative service, governed by ‘clock time’ – with reference to Company School and Kalighat paintings. She counters the monstrous clock-face of chaakri with the figure of the spiritual seeker and ‘God-intoxicated man’ or pagal, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836-1886), who cautioned his devotees against the ‘dasatya of chaakri’ – the slavery of the office job (Sumit Sarkar, Renaissance and Kaliyuga).

Nancy then engages with the present as a time of hyper-chaakri. The impulse of the neoliberal economy is to maximise the time available for monetisation and commodification. In such a context, ceramic practice asserts its ability to offer viewers the gift of time, whether conceived as a process of layered labour, as contemplative engagement with materiality, as alchemical transformation, or as an opening towards the rituals of sociality.

By embracing sociality, Nancy argues, Madhvi has attempted to break the spell of the studio-shaped fetish object and restore the ceramicist’s art to the circuits of everyday life, in which the viewer does not remain a passive consumer but organically contributes to the process of art-making. In Sahej’s case, Nancy argues that his playful, speculative approach to history and his engagement with the archaeological or post-industrial ruin is marked by an insistence on rigour and criticality: he works from a commitment to establishing what history is for from a liberal-progressive point of view.

In adjacency to these two practices, Nancy places the potter and activist Devi Prasad’s nai talim experiments in Sewagram, Wardha, in the late-colonial period and early independence era next to Madhvi’s current attempts at sociality. The nai talim experiments were based on Gandhian pedagogical principles of a holistic education where body, mind and spirit could be cultivated simultaneously. In Sahej’s case, she examines his affinity with the artist-outlier Nekchand, who had the courage to counter Corbusier’s authoritarian modernism by building a sculpture garden out of terracotta detritus, industrial ceramic waste, broken bangles and bicycle frames on the periphery of Corbusier’s master plan in 1960s Chandigarh.

By pushing back the horizons of the contemporary and citing the nai talim experiment and Nekchand’s sculpture garden, Nancy signals to the audience witnessing the first Indian Ceramics Triennale that the expansion of the art of ceramics in the current era cannot be limited merely to a formal or technical newness or an updated political rhetoric. It calls for an ethical responsibility that seeks to renew the integral resources of the medium while also re-negotiating its limitations.