Walking Man - Evolution Story

Description

The work Walking Man is a personalized evolution story. It is an oblique reference to the critique of Hegelian* concept of Western historical civilization as deterministically progressive, what he called, the World Spirit. In the midst of the critique of Hegel where the idea of Western Universalism is seen an oxymoron I imagine my own historical-consciousness of evolution as a counteract. The work makes explicit references to Darwin’s theory of evolution; the famous/infamous theory e=mc2 that lead to the nuclear energy/weapons counteracts with Rodin’s Thinker; Existential Vacuum and Giacometti’s Walking Men, Gandhi’s non-violence movement in the midst of worst violence and mayhem that Indian has ever witnessed; The nightmarish horse of Picasso’s Guernica re-enacted in Kashmir; Paul Klee’s childlike world where one can go for a walk with a line is confronted with Van Gough’s Pair of Shoes; the blind poet singing: “where were you when I became the silence of T in Tsunami…”** The work, in its candid references to art-history, constructs a narrative recalling some of the historical ruptures deconstructing the Hegelian idea of civilizational progress that he so emphatically attributed to the western thought. The work aims to evoke a certain realization in the deterministic faith in the modernist claim of linear progress towards utopia. It submits its discontent by foregrounding the element of dystopia implicit in the modernist’s project of utopia. The work is intentionally split into seven*** vertical panels, which takes into account the crucial role of a viewer in the process of creating or destroying the process of meaning making. The viewer is at liberty to shuffle or rearrange the seven panels as he desires and hence authenticate ‘his/her’ story of evolution. .................... *Hegel’s linear theory of history that leads to liberal Western supremacy where a country like India had “no history” at all, has had a monumental influence on the Western thought and its attitude to the non-western world. ** The line is from my poem “Where Am I”. *** The ‘seven’, here, constitutes a week.