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Lot 35

 

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Rashid Rana's art is among some of the most recognisable in the contemporary art world today. His imagery forces an immediate recognition by the viewer. It is by forcing cliché through the interrogatory process of an art historical focus that Rana arrives at work that at once looks utterly familiar in its populist tendencies and yet, simultaneously, functions squarely within the multiple histories of traditional and new media art. Here the... Rashid Rana's art is among some of the most recognisable in the contemporary art world today. His imagery forces an immediate recognition by the viewer. It is by forcing cliché through the interrogatory process of an art historical focus that Rana arrives at work that at once looks utterly familiar in its populist tendencies and yet, simultaneously, functions squarely within the multiple histories of traditional and new media art. Here the boundaries between advertising, painting, print making, photography and video are substantially blurred.

Where much has been commented on the duality of Rana's work in terms of content, there are other dualities that are evident but perhaps not as obvious. The present lot deals with the relationship between a still image, a frozen moment (the carpet) and time based media with animated images (the small tiles of an abattoir at work). Moreover we are presented with the two world-views of pictorial space. In South Asia there has been a historical association with the essential flatness of imagery and surface that works at diametric opposites to the Western obsession with illusionistic three-dimensional space. As is often the case in Rana's work the two dimensional view - here of the carpet - gives way to the realistic, perspectival imagery as seen in this lot in the imagery of the slaughterhouse.

It is a truism that art from what was traditionally understand to be the periphery has quickly come to occupy a central space in the global art scene. The rapidity with which this has happened is breathtaking and it is worth noting that Rashid Rana though a mid-career artist is already considered to be perhaps one of the most important artists currently active in on the international art stage. It is with this in mind that one arrives at the work of Rana with a recognition that his art objects in themselves represent this changing global dynamic: there is a power to them.

“The images of carpets, made up as they are of gory images of slaughter, pose a challenge to the ‘aesthetic’ sensibility, that must simultaneously be able to appreciate and evaluate objects of value and beauty (connoisseurship), and to accept the mundane presence of death and banal violence in the general economy. In a sense, making art (or other objects of beauty like the oriental carpets) and killing are both activities which acquire their significance in modern life through extremely developed forms of ritual, and through the creation of specialized spaces where the rules of the outside world are temporarily suspended: museums and galleries for art, and slaughterhouses for the killing of animals. Through bringing the two terrains together, Rana temporarily restores an original violence to each, and makes their parasitic codependency explicit.” Adnan Madani, May-2008, Karachi

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