Kavitha Balakrishnan
Govt.College of Fine Arts, Thrissur
Dr.Kavitha Balakrishnan is an artist, poet and art educator based at Kerala. Winner of Soviet Land Nehru Award for painting at the age of thirteen in 1989 she emerged as an artist very early in life. Trained in Art Historical studies from M S university Baroda, she writes bilingually (Malayalam & English) on art since 1998. She has two books on art to her credit, both articulating Kerala in the context of Modern and contemporary practices. Her area of research connects media, design and art history through 20th century modern Indian art experience. She has widely lectured on Art in national and international seminars. Currently she is teaching Art History at Govt.College of Fine Arts, Thrissur since 2005. Her paintings are widely exhibited and has also published two poetry collections in Malayalam.
Abstract:
Making of Visual Behaviors in Print: A brief history of illustration from Kerala
My paper presents an Indian region’s case of approaching illustration practice within its 20th century literate-media contexts. Kerala had been ‘a lively laboratory of literacy and media behavior’ that tested the ideas of public sphere, print capitalism and public action, among the Indian language regions (Robin Jeffrey: 2004). Firstly this presentation outlines a few characteristic contexts of the Malayali reader using his unarticulated flip side, the Malayali looker. Further within these contexts it gives an image-rich story of the way a range of print-picture genres, a visual field of literary illustrators, cartoonists, graphic authors, calligraphic title & film poster designers and photo-featurists behaved in the mindscapes of a reading class.
The literary illustrators among them most perplexingly bear the problematics of ‘aesthetic viewing’ in an ephemeral, journalistic and popular domain by eventual establishment of significant artist-agencies in this locality. This had created attitudes not only for artists but also for writers and literary editors in this society to make sense of their tasks. Their story is presented on the basis of an extensive archival re-search invested in the domain of Malayalam periodical magazines(1900-2012). This presentation would virtually underscore an extended world of artist-people in this locale who keep on touching the public with technique and content of literary attitudes, relentlessly figuring their fictions.
I am talking the story of a people whose formation as ‘modern subjects doing art’ has been quite tentative and slanted ever since the times of pioneering Indian modernist from Kerala, Raja Ravi Varma. Having initiated both the rare and the popular means of touching people with the ‘literary attitude’, Varma had prolonged problematic artistic status in 20th century. Also as this visual field from Kerala proves, there were sustained uses of representationalism for the tasteful making of discreet cultural hegemony and dissemination of patriarchy in this region.
Keywords: Literary Illustration, Print media studies, visual interpretation, Media history, Art Histories, archival studies