Romance Of Personal And Political In Contemporary Art In Sri Lanka

By Dev N Pathak -October 24, 2012

Dr.Dev N Pathak

Lecture delivered at the launch of the book, Artists Remember; Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Sri Lankan Visual Arts (Colombo Institute and Theertha, Colombo 2012; ISBN 978 955 4501-00-3) at the Post Graduate Institute of Archeology, Colombo, 28^thSeptember 2012.

As to why art is created, there could possibly be an inexorable series of answers. Some could be mystical-conjectural alluding to the relation between artistic creativity and the divine; some other could refer to the political economy of imagination, creation and consumption. In addition to this, there has been already an unresolved tension between ‘art for the world’ and ‘art for the sake of art’; and indeed it is also possible to say today that art is primarily for artists’ sake. Sasanka Perera takes an intellectual plunge into the visual art from Sri Lanka and ferrets out a few novel answers by far untold. Thereby he deftly breathes new lease of life into the enterprise of social anthropology by studying art history at the juncture in history which some anthropologists have elsewhere termed ‘critical moments’. In very much a modern society, with deceitfully advanced capitalism at its best, and an intriguingly desperate state struggling to assert its supremacy at its worst, social anthropology is enjoined with the daunting task of locating human history in the middle of situations of crises; and of course thereby a harmony between the intellectually separated disciplines of sociology and history, politics and economics, are pushed for a much needed alliance. Doing the same, with erudition of scholarship and sophistication of his craft, and yet in the linguistic register of the ordinary, Sasanka Perera reaffirms the slogan that originated in feminist scholarship- personal is political. It however is not all that his monograph titled Artists Remember; Artists Narrate: Memory and Representation in Sri Lankan Visual Arts eloquently promises and efficiently delivers. Perera enriches the feminist slogan by adroitly reversing the order- the political is personal too. The dialectic of personal and political underpins the art scene in Sri Lanka. It is this phenomenon, a philosophic-theoretical premium of this monograph, that renders it distinguishable from the attempts at doing art history in the region. While art historians’ incestuous intimacy with the ‘good-old days’ is never ending, especially due to the vested interest of ideological state apparatus, this book confirms a possibility of liberation from the prison of formulaic scholarship. Without compromising the aesthetic appeals of the visual art, this monograph underscores the social history in the backdrop of each creation. Without ignoring the details of creating and exhibiting, this monograph maintains its focus on the relationship between the biographical and the historical. It echoes the classical dictum of C. Wright Mills, the American sociologist who propounded the idea of sociological imagination at the dusk of Second World War, ‘when wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar man; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both’. Needless to say, it summons utmost conviction and courage to present knowledge without discriminating between what is pleasant and what is unpleasant.Sasanka Perera accomplishes the feat nearly in entirety.

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