Archive Project 21: Sandeep Mukherjee

The Project Series
Project 21: Sandeep Mukherjee

Sandeep Mukherjee's Open Epic

Behind the altar of a Venetian church called San Moisè stands a strange and wonderful Baroque tableau, the product of a collaboration between architect Alessandro Tremignon and sculptor Heinrich Meyring. Cobbled together from larger than life-size figures and other elements carved from variously colored rock, it depicts the Old Testament moment when Moses, standing atop Mount Sinai, received two stone tablets upon which God had just written the covenant testimony with his divine finger. Moses bows in awe and touches one of the tablets as God, encircled by a whirling cloud of angels, hovers above the peak with one arm outstretched as if he has just finished the inscription. A painted backdrop shows a swarm of angels trumpeting the event. But these are the finer details of the scene, and in the end, the drama of the San Moisè altarpiece—the sense of a journey reaching a key, revelatory point that is personal, human and intimate while also truly monumental, epic, cosmic—is derived from the manner in which the finer points are played against this work's dominant image, narrative element, and metaphor: the mountain. In a move particularly bold for an indoor work in a relatively small church, a decision that makes this tableau worthy of being counted among the grandest (if strangest) productions of the Baroque, the builders of San Moisè chose to sculpt not just the scene's characters but also a sizable piece of the mountain itself.

In a fitting follow-up to the ambitious, room-encircling frieze of images he produced in 2002, Sandeep Mukherjee currently is working on a mountain of his own. As with the San Moisè altarpiece, Mukherjee's scene—precisely articulated through acrylic painting, fine drawing in colored pencil, and delicate embossing on a velum-like material called Duralene—shows a collection of figures revolving around a massive centralized crag. Unlike the many figures that populate the scene at San Moisè—figures specific to characters such as God or Moses, or to categories like the chorus of angels—the numerous figures in Mukherjee's scene all appear identical and interchangeable. In fact, as with all the figurative images Mukherjee has produced in the last few years, the figures are based upon the physiognomy of the artist himself. In Mukherjee's art, however, his own multiplied image seems less an exercise in self-portraiture or narcissism than an opportunity to produce a familiar, recurring, generic stand-in, a humanoid Rorschach blot upon which we can project ourselves, others, personalities, personas, or fantasies. And while in the case of the representation of Moses on the mountain, we know the difference between who is heavenly and who is mortal, in Mukherjee's scene, it remains enigmatic as to whether his figures are human beings, spirits, states of mind, fragments of self, or figments of the imagination.

In the San Moisè altarpiece, as well as in Mukherjee’s new work, the mountain connotes scale and proportion—not those of the artworks, both of which are large, but of the scene pictured. The mountains speak of magnitude, of the broader epics of which these scenes are a part. At San Moisè, the mountain reminds us that the very personal scene we witness—a one-on-one between Moses and his God—is nonetheless a moment that is monumental in import and part of an even greater story. Similarly, in Mukherjee's work, the central mountain—which stands out in gradated gold and violet from the pale range of which it is part, and which functions as a backdrop for figures that share its airspace—lends epic proportion to the scene. Moreover, the mountain functions as a metaphor for the monumentality of the artist's task in attempting to represent a conflation of personal experience and cosmic event, an epic quest/test that might have seemed a fundamental calling to many artists of the Baroque age, but an endeavor seldom undertaken in the present secular air.

But even in the smallest, most intimate of the works he has produced since the late 1990s, Mukherjee has never shied away from touching upon the epic. Each of his works reads as a chapter in a greater and more mysterious story. And the story remains mysterious: with each of Mukherjee's installments, one gets the sense that something quite small and very big, something rather mundane and indeed extraordinary is playing itself out. In this most recent piece, his multiplied figures plummet, fly, drift, and are propelled through the air around the mountain. Their naked bodies seem to phase in and out of states of being, from flesh-and-blood matter to supernatural energy, as their images shift in relation to the negative and positive space of the background. They alternate between renderings in dark on light to a negative, or seemingly solarized, light on dark. Meanwhile, the mountain, overlaid with the embossed lines of other peaks that seem to run across it or bleed through it, also appears to exist in an ambiguous status somewhere between matter, mirage, and idea. The figures seem at every turn to grapple—with one another, with space, with the terrain—with how to establish an interface between their own fluxing existences and the bigger, broader fluxing existence around them. As often is the case with Mukherjee’s scenes, the image evokes a blur of responses ranging from a sense of bliss to one of anxiety.

Though the quest or journey is never literalized, never ultimately revealed as it is in most epic tales, Mukherjee's characters always are making their way along a path that is perhaps psychological, sexual, or secularly spiritual. They shoot, swim and soar, float, fall and fumble through space. Sometimes they walk right in; sometimes they wade through it. But it is evident that they are, even when seemingly at their most restful states, engaged in a process of negotiating and navigating their way through the realms in which we find them. Whether calm, curious, bewildered or troubled, they always seem to be simply passing through, and each image gives the sense of something building—the sense that these figures, which might be moving toward some sort of revelation, realization, transformation, or higher state of being, are already in a process of becoming, already reaching some greater awareness.

As with Mukherjee’s mountain scene, the exact nature of his figures, their environs, and the interface between, remains perplexing in most of his works. Though meticulously rendered with anatomical detail, the figures usually elude certainty of scale; they could be microscopic, Lilliputian, human, or titanic in size; or tiny and giant figures sometimes might coexist. This confusion is only enhanced by the artist’s spatial plays, which confound expectations of more conventional relationships between overlapping forms, like objects of diminishing size, and objects subjected to the atmospheric effects of a shared space. Needless to say, the environs or realms that Mukherjee depicts in manners that range from highly stylized realism to referential abstraction often become as difficult for viewers to grasp as for their stand-ins to negotiate. One cannot tell if the stand-ins are spiraling among the strands of a DNA chain in inner space or through a wormhole in outer space, if they are making rings in the surface of calm waters or sending ripples out across the fabric of the universe. At times it seems as if they might be wandering through someone's garden, strolling among flowers, or caught in a windy cascade of falling leaves; or they might just as well be exploring another dimension, riding rays of light between starbursts and standing amidst showers of diamonds or pixie dust.

As with the creations of Baroque artists to whom he is kin, Mukherjee's art derives its impact from a mastery of style and technique, and a facility for picturing dynamic figures in space. In the case of Mukherjee, who marries a Baroque sensibility with a postmodern promiscuity—crisscrossing cultures, centuries, genres, media, and boundaries of high and low—the results are dazzling. One sees in Mukherjee's works traces of handicrafts, illuminated manuscripts and pop religious postcards from the world over. One sees Hollywood and Bollywood, old-world and new-wave. The works are homegrown and designer. They are ancient India, Classical Greece, and classic Las Vegas. They are disco, techno, Day-Glo, Tiepolo, and Tintoretto. They are Warhol and Bernini meeting Liberace and Rothko on the road to a supernatural Studio 54 reunion rave at a Bombay cyber café. Yes, that is what they are, but what might sound like an awkward pastiche (and what likely would be in other hands) is in fact a sleek fusion that is truly cross-cultural, a fusion that runs warm and cool.

Of course, the great difference between the epic story Mukherjee brings into his works and the depictions of epics we often find in the history of art is that usually we know, or can access, the story in some sort of literary form, oral tradition, or commonly held narrative or set of ideas. Whether or not they are accompanied by actual texts, visual representations of the epics we know—from the Mahabharata to the Iliad to how the West was won—are inscribed by culture. We don’t enjoy the opportunity to inscribe these images with our own meanings so much as the recognition of conventions triggers our awareness of culturally established interpretations and associations that inform our personal responses. Regardless of poetic, deconstructionist and "open" readings, such visual epics in the end return to the status of closed texts. The San Moisè altarpiece, for instance, with its ties to a specific narrative, a specific religious tradition, and a specific iconographic program, might allow us some leeway in appreciating the quirkiness of how a tale is told, and perhaps how this quirkiness adds a kind of inflection to the tale, but the tale itself is set in stone. It’s odd connotations and implications, and our free interpretations, can never truly outdistance the reach of its cultural binds. But Mukherjee's work, while it sends out feelers to countless references, ruptures expectations of direct connection to any specific narrative, tradition, or iconography. A kind of epic-ness, or the sense or feeling of epic proportion, thus becomes key in Mukherjee's art. Emphasizing their materiality and precision while also seeming ephemeral and perceptually slippery, and broadly borrowing devices from a global history of two- and three-dimensional art, Mukherjee’s works reemploy established conventions from representations of epics to create unconventional representations of the epic that remain open and widely evocative. As did the builders of San Moisè when they built their mountain, Mukherjee uses every tool in his box, sometimes finessing nuances, sometimes pulling flashy maneuvers, to let us know, in each and every one of his works, that we are glimpsing, often on a minute level, a fragment or scene of an epic tale. His is simply an epic that remains ours to write, from one installment to the next, from one viewer to the next. The monumental meets the personal not just within the image, but in the viewers’ experiences as Mukherjee's grand images await each of our very intimate associative inscriptions.


Christopher Miles
Los Angeles
December 2003