To become an artist, one doesn’t necessarily have to go to an art
school, in fact the
untrained artists work with purer, more raw and more authentic creative
impulses, driven by passion alone. Nevertheless, there is the confidence and
validation you gain from holding a degree that proclaims you an artist, but
does art need that testimony? Iqbal Geoffrey certainly doesn’t. To come across
a noncommercial self-taught
artist, particularly in Pakistan, who hasn’t had any formal art training, is a
rare encounter. Traditionally such neuve innovators are located ‘outside’ the periphery of the art-circle
but unlike other outsider artists, Geoffrey enjoys a great deal of appreciation and
remuneration from the western art world, if not at home, and is recognized as
an unparalleled phenomenon in the modern art world by British and American art
critics. Though, his work is not entirely uninfluenced by artistic norms.
Geoffrey, a lawyer by profession as well as an artist, is quite a unique
character, whose off-canvas activities are perhaps far more interesting than his on-canvas
performance. Famous for suing people left and right and burning his finalized
pieces without ever exhibiting them, to name only two examples of his uncompromising
nature.
Punctuated
with question marks, his antics and his work, both, are acts of rejection; of traditional ideas about beautiful and
appropriate, of institutional
framework within which art is received and by which it is mediated, of
conventional distinctions regarding what is and is not art, of accepted views
about art and artists, of sanctity of genre conventions, of boundaries, of logic,
of viewers’ expectations, of authorities and hierarchies, of definite meaning,
of. . . . This total destruction of ideas that have any
discipline, both intellectually and physically resembles the Dadaist
sensibility, which
naturally makes him an artistic rebel. His vision of art, both affirms
and denies Art simultaneously, in a
provocative yet playful manner and poses the question; “What is art?” without
necessarily attempting to answer it.
Geoffrey,
an avid collector of objects and mass media imagery, uses these trivial details
from his everyday life and transforms these ordinary things into private
possessions, into precious memorials, into surviving traces, into witnesses,
that don’t particularly reveal anything extraordinary yet tell stories about
their maker/collector. Or perhaps these non-original popular images represent ‘no-thing’, perhaps they are the essence
of ‘no-thing-ness’, just as a white
on white painting, from his exhibition, reads ‘Emptiness’. Perhaps questioning; the meaninglessness of modern
existence, or the need for meaning in Art, or what it means to empty content out of painting. This simultaneous
presence and absence (or presence through absence) depicting both nothingness
and limitlessness, is an exciting union of opposites that is either producing a
new kind of meaning or obliterating the need for meaning altogether.
His
obscure landscapes pieced
together with objects/images, freed from their original context and reassembled
within anomalous compositions, represent the fragmented nature of the contemporary
culture, or perhaps it demonstrates that they can never be truly freed from
their original context. In one moment the very banality of the everyday
qualifies as Art, while in the next moment this assortment of visuals is
rendered insignificant, useless or dysfunctional, asking the viewer to shift
back and forth between just looking and experiencing or understanding the
process of interpretation. But for most part it draws the viewer’s attention
towards the playful undecided process of making
rather than the subject of the work.
In this union of simplicity and ambiguity, these surrealist assemblages have more of a psychoanalytic rather than
aesthetic function, redefining the concepts of authorship and ownership and (following
the footsteps of Duchamp, who is said to have been an admirer of Geoffrey’s)
re-contextualizing existing "readymade" objects/images as Art, bypassing literal perceptions, breaking narrative
expectations, surprising the viewers and asking them to fill in the gaps.
What is most remarkable is his ability to speak his heart
with a rather shameless confidence, when narrating the self. The gallery space,
adorned with buntings arranged from wall to wall, reading ‘I am a fan of Iqbal Geoffrey and so was Leonardo da Vinci’ together
with the paintings, drawings and collages (some dating as far back as the 60s),
is an exhibition of unapologetic (masturbatory) narcissism, the kind that perhaps
politicians practice during election campaigns, that is sort of like a self
conscious performance. Richard Avedon in an essay ‘borrowed dogs’ has expanded on this link between performance and
self-portraiture, expressing that autobiographical tellings, such as self-portraiture,
are ‘extreme stylized behaviors complete with theatrical conventions while
performing in a very self-conscious way -filled with flattery and lies, yet
truthful - lies about who they were and truths about who they wanted to be’. Employing
this performative nature of autobiography Geoffrey performs a portrait of
himself that is preoccupied with questions of identity; art’s, artists’ and his
own (and the blurring distinctions between the three). Ironically masked with
innocence and laced with tongue in cheek humor, there is a
dismissal of seriousness in the work yet a severity coupled with
self-righteousness towards it aswell.
But whether this self-proclaimed fame refers to the ephemerality of fame
in this age of information or if it is an inquiry into artistic empowerment or
if it questions the myths about the artistic genius or if it suggests that the
contemporary artist no longer has to make anything, he has become his own myth
or if these are simply evidences of his awesomeness, in them, one can
distinguish a man who believes in
what he does. Such unquestionable belief that is beyond doubt doesn’t even need
to be verified (even a lie told often enough becomes the truth). Isn’t this
what all Art demands; a certain sense of unquestionable belief, devotion and submission.
