The Power Of Words

Artists use text in a variety of ways – as narrative, as social and political critique, as gibberish. Anirudh Chari reads the works of artists from Bengal.

- Anirudh Chari

Texts and numbers have long been juxtaposed with images, complementing, articulating and even clarifying one another. In Bengal, this has venerable origins with one of the earliest examples being the doodles of the poet and artist Rabindranath Tagore where he transformed struckout lines and words into images which assumed evocative and frequently phantasmagoric forms. Those images were entirely serendipitous and shaped by intuitive decisions and accidents and helped shape a new visual vocabulary which informs and impacts artistic practices even today.

In works of several recent artists, words and numbers have become the central focus of the image instead of a mere accompaniment, resulting in a new syntax that is not merely aesthetic but also conceptual.

The sculptor Meera Mukherjee used letters from the Bengali alphabet in her bronzes for their visual and aesthetic potential and also entire lines of poetry which were not immediately apparent but yielded their secrets on close inspection. It was as though she was imparting to the viewer a key with which to decode the mysteries of her work. A highly stylized method of creating texture, this use of script contributes to a more nuanced interpretation of her work. Adip Dutta, who was mentored by Mukherjee, continues this tradition both in his sculptural works as well as his drawings. In works such as Animate Among the Inanimate, seemingly arbitrary objects like gloves, aircraft and hairbrushes are placed next to lines or blocks of random text which exploit the visual qualities of script but also look to remake meaning through language. The emphasis here is as much on ideas as visual forms where text and language are key components in taking meaning beyond the mere physicality of objects.