About the talk

One can almost hear the cacophony of parakeets as their green bodies punctuate the branches of a tamarind tree. In another work, a dog, somewhat emaciated, back curved, stares out at us from a milky grey-blue background. In another, a cheery octopus cavorts in the curve of a river; over here, monkeys hang from branches in a crowded field of pink and blue pastel vegetation. The paintings of Chennai-based artist KCS Paniker from the 1960s and 1970s explode with vibrant life, both vegetal and animal. They often, and in the same painting, overwhelm us with written symbols and passages of what look like text. Thus, Paniker’s work is not landscape painting, nor is it a critical rethinking of the long global history of animal studies from the turkey portrait by the seventeenth-century Mughal artist Mansur to the staged birds of the Audubon Society. Paniker’s work does not depict nature in any imaginary pure state, instead giving us a pruned, selected vision of trees, animals, birds, and plants alongside the marks humans make to seek understanding of the world: math equations, astrological diagrams, textual scrawls, magic symbols. Brown reads his work as outlining an ecology of human-animal-plant mutuality, one that presents painted, curated “gardens.” In these works, we can see the embedded dependencies of the modern—dependence of the human and non-human, yes, and also dependence on the languages of modern painting itself: birds, color, a tree, a symbol, a dog, a chart, a monkey, a line. Paniker drew from a long history of exploring these intersections in modern art alongside the history of engagements with the animal, the human, and the otherworldly in a range of South Asian contexts. His paintings offer us the “modern” through an ecology of painted gardens.

About the speaker

Rebecca M. Brown is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Chair of the Advanced Academic Programs in Museum Studies and Cultural Heritage Management at Johns Hopkins University. Brown specializes in modern and contemporary art, architecture, and visual culture in a global frame. She has published numerous articles and three books; her work unpacks the fraught politics of colonial-era urban space, architecture, and painting in the Indian subcontinent, the genealogy of spinning and the anti-colonial movement of the early twentieth century (Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India, Routledge 2010), modernism in the decades after decolonization (Art for a Modern India, Duke 2009), and the diplomatic, museological, and cultural machinations of the long 1980s (Displaying Time: The Many Temporalities of the Festival of India, Washington 2017). She is currently writing through and with the southern Indian painter KCS Paniker (1911–77), tracing his errant journey to unfold a language of painting in the postcolonial, globally connected world of the 1960s and 1970s. Other interests extend to contemporary photography via the work of Dayanita Singh and Annu Palakunnathu Matthew, and to the decolonizing maneuvers of the sculpture–installations of Rina Banerjee.

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