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Lot 36

 

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What strikes critic Ranjit Hoskote about T.V. Santhosh is “his grasp of the crises of our globalised present, his taste for translating current events, even as they unfold, into narratives that are to allegorical to be history, yet too mutable to be myth”. Though he draws his materials from the news media, cinema and art history, “his pattern of selection is determined…by the key themes of war and catastrophe: his is an art attentive to the... What strikes critic Ranjit Hoskote about T.V. Santhosh is “his grasp of the crises of our globalised present, his taste for translating current events, even as they unfold, into narratives that are to allegorical to be history, yet too mutable to be myth”. Though he draws his materials from the news media, cinema and art history, “his pattern of selection is determined…by the key themes of war and catastrophe: his is an art attentive to the specific idioms of contemporary global conflict, to the diabolical pact between knowledge and terror” (Transfigurations at the Margin of Blur, One Hand Clapping / Siren, The Guild Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2003, unpaginated).

In this largely monochromatic piece, Santhosh appropriates stock images from news archives, contrasting the 1937 crash of the passenger-zeppelin Hindenburg in New Jersey, with an image of two men measuring the wingspan of a wandering albatross. Through this provocative pairing of the largest rigid aircraft ever built at the time and the largest flying bird known to man, the manmade and the natural, Santhosh seems to warily warn his viewers about the unsure path down which technology may lead. Having caught fire without any assignable cause, the airship is caught careening to the ground engulfed in flames. At the same time, the captured albatross aches to be released and glide from continent to continent as it has for centuries, circumnavigating the globe.

Here, the artist is perhaps suggesting that when science and technology strive to harness and reproduce the natural, and man continues to ambitiously advance his own creations, the results can be lethal. Several years before developing the Zeppelin, the Germans had made Albatros - an aircraft supplied to their air force during World War I. Over the years, Albatros was modified several times, each attempt resulting in a deadlier machine, and it is possible that Santhosh might have been alluding to this specific war machine in the present lot. The blurred panel on the left of the main image in this piece represents Santhosh’s premonitions about the austere future that this kind of development can spawn, a time of “cosmic radiation” and “microbiological skeins” (Ibid.).

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