“The seed, in the process of becoming a tree, is not an isolated entity adrift in flowing time; it is engaged in a dynamic and complex interplay with the environment.”∼ Krishna Reddy, Intaglio Simultaneous Color Printmaking, 1988. Printmaking rarely receives much attention as an original genre of art, particularly in India. Not only there is little written on printmakers of India, in my discussions with friends, who are interested in art, I have found persistent refrain and hesitancy when it comes to “prints” – as though prints lacked the originality and aura that paintings seem to have. I have been fascinated by the prints of several Indian/South Asian origin artists, Krishna Reddy in particular. Reddy (1925-2018) has been commonly hailed as “one of the most important printmakers.” And as, Luis Cancel, the former Director of the Bronx Museum of Arts, who I just quoted, rightly added, an exploration of Reddy’s works takes us “on a journey through a fascinating and innovative technical landscape.” This landscape includes his invention of the colour viscosity printing or “simultaneous colour printmaking,” which he developed in collaboration with Stanley William Hayter and Kaiko Moti (another Indian origin printmaker) at Atelier 17 in Paris.Krishna Reddy, Plants, 1966.I wish to explore a particular aspect of Reddy’s contribution to art that, I believe, has not received enough attention – his quest to capture the temporal emergence of the world in which we live through printmaking. Temporal emergence is a concept that has been used in my field of science and technology studies (STS) to signify a number of things, including to present a post-humanist approach for the study of techno-scientific practice and, more broadly, that of the society. I draw on a particular element of the concept – contingent and open-ended temporality of life and becoming – to understand and explain Reddy’s printmaking. Indeed, as B. N. Goswamy in one of his essays (“Hora: The Medieval Hours”) suggested: “Time…is mysterious and elusive and…in the final analysis, incomprehensible.” Reddy’s prints, I believe, reflect a deep concern with capturing the “mystery” of time and becoming as they unfold in various forms of life (social as well as natural) – the temporal emergence of the world around him/us. I should admit at the outset that I am neither an art historian nor an artist. I am a sociologist by training and profession and love Reddy’s art (and I own 22 of Reddy’s prints) and these bear on my understanding and analysis.Interestingly, even Reddy’s collaborators – fellow printmakers – seem to have missed his concern with temporality. Stanley Hayter, who had established Atelier 17 in Paris in 1927 to experiment, teach, and promote printmaking, in his introduction to Krishna Reddy: A Retrospective (published by the Bronx Museum of Arts, 1981), for example, stated that Reddy’s “images draw one into a contemplative world where time in unimportant” (emphasis added). Hayter’s observation stemmed from what he considered Reddy’s disinterest in offering “a version of the obvious scenes, objects, and temporary incidents of ordinary existence.” Evidently, Reddy was not interested in the depiction of everyday practices of either human beings or those in nature. Most of his prints (barring perhaps the “clown with a pigeon”) have been abstract, even though they refer to specific social or natural events or objects. However, time, rather temporality, was central to Reddy’s printmaking and to his philosophy of life. His book, Intaglio Simultaneous Color Printmaking (1988), starts with a chapter titled “Process as Experiment and Exploration” in which he categorically stated that an “artist who cannot change and be fluid in his ideas is not really alive”. The concept of time and temporally shifting transformations, which I have sought to present through the concept of temporal emergence, can also help us see how Reddy, through his printmaking, transgressed the commonly accepted boundaries between nature and culture.Reddy often used metaphors of nature to describe his printmaking. However, in contrast to Luis Cancel’s claim that Reddy used “natural laws and principles” to present “organic patterns and relationships,” nature, to quote Reddy, represented “a state of constant movement and change”. Nature, in Reddy’s art, seems emblematic of struggle with the human constituted social order. Nevertheless, nature was not a refuge. His prints of events or objects in nature, for example, are not realistic depictions of natural processes (see, for example, his prints titled water lilies, plants, river, insect, etc.). Rather, they too focus on process and transformation and not on static events or realistic objects. The various natural or social objects that were the focus of Reddy’s prints seems to be tools to think about an existential tension. This tension in our existence, according to Reddy, arose because we were born into and lived in an already constituted social order that was “stable and predictable” and yet if we wanted to be creative, we had to continually grapple with this “humanly conceived system.” The goal for Reddy, which we see in his prints, was to confront socially conditioned thinking that keeps “us from an intimate participation in the world”; rather than try “to control…the…object,” engage with “its dynamism and flux”.His prints seem to blur the modernist divides, such as those between nature and society – the representation of a tree, in terms of elementary geometrical shapes, was, as Reddy explained in his writings, similar to that of a skyscraper or that of a human demonstrator. He also did not see the artist as separate or separable from the materials s/he used and the environment within which s/he was situated: the artist, Reddy suggested, “discovers, in the interaction of the plate and other materials, a web of dynamic patterns with himself as an active participant in the process”. Reddy’s tryst with temporal emergence was evident even in simple and basic aspects of printmaking. Consider Reddy’s print that is commonly referred to as “Demonstrators” – he gave that title himself as is evident in the edition that, for example, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MET), New York. I own another edition of the same print, which is dedicated to Kaiko Moti (and dated two years earlier than the one in MET’s collection), and it is titled “Aspiration” (see image).We can easily slip into suggesting that the reason for this difference in naming was contingent on circumstances and that it just happened (as Judy Blum Reddy, his wife, had informed me and I don’t doubt her memory in this regard). The contingency in naming, however, has also to be seen in light of what, I consider, is Reddy’s concern with depicting temporal emergence. Reddy argued that “our mental concepts…cannot adequately probe the recesses of reality” – hence there is always an overflow of meaning that cannot be easily captured by the signifier (such as the title). Interestingly, Reddy not only had more than one title for several of his prints, his titles often switched between a verb and a noun (e.g., “aspiration” and “demonstrators”), which reflect not just semantic shifts, but that between becoming and being. He, for example, titled the same print “butterfly formation” and “two fishes” or would not even title a print, even if it was an artist’s proof (see the accompanying image). Reddy’s titles also show that the subject of his prints may cut across different species.The titling of prints, albeit not trivial, is not the only example of Reddy’s quest with temporal emergence. It is also evident in how he brought sculpting into print making. Simultaneous colour printmaking used differing viscosities of colour pigments along with physical variations in the etchings on the plate (which is used to produce the prints on paper) to produce vibrantly colourful prints. “New ways of working the plate,” Reddy argued, “involve conceiving and working on the plate with sculptural methods”. Reddy, as Stanley Hayter rightly observed, treated “the plate [used to produce the print] as a sculpture in itself.” Reddy’s artistic intervention in this regard should not be seen simply in practical terms – as technical achievements. The MET defines printmaking as “transferring images from a matrix onto another surface” such that the “print is often the mirror image of the original design on the matrix.”Reddy’s prints from the same plate, do not differ in design (because the etchings on the plate is the same), but they commonly vary in colour and, as a result, the prints look very different and induce very different impact on the viewer (see the two images of “Fish” and for other such variations see the collection of Reddy’s prints, at the Experimenter’s gallery, Kolkata). Let’s also not forget that Reddy’s objective in printmaking was significantly different from most other printmakers. Joan Miro, who “created vast bodies of work in both intaglio and lithography,” and is arguably one of the best-known printmakers in the world, for example, described his “mature style” of prints as “images to rival any painting” (phillips.com). Reddy attempted to make printmaking stand on its own and print for him was not, to use a Jacques Derrida’s term, a supplement of painting.Reddy’s artistic philosophy is often attributed to the influence of J. Krishnamurty and to his Indian roots, which is understandable. However, such portrayals often slip into an Orientalist and West-centric portrayal of Reddy’s philosophy and art (as is often the case in relation to artists of non-Western origin). The New York Times’ obituary of Reddy, for example, highlighted latter’s “role in the shaping of Modernist art in India.” The obituary reminded the readers that Reddy demonstrated “that Abstract art was not a Western invention…but had distinctive sources and forms in other cultures.” The obituary, while praising Reddy’s immense contribution to printmaking, slips into the Orientalist imagination that intensifies the difference and distance between the West and the non-West and provincialises Reddy’s art and work, even when there is clear evidence of untenability of such an understanding through Reddy’s life and work.If anything, Krishna Reddy represented an anti- and post-colonial cosmopolitanism. He, for example, made posters for the Quit India Movement in 1942 and in support of the Algerian Revolution, when he was in Paris. Reddy has not only left a rich of oeuvre of prints and invented new techniques for printmaking, but also sought to liberate printmaking from being a supplement of painting.Amit Prasad is Associate Professor, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology.
