Hunting for metaphors

Many years ago I met someone I will always call ‘friend’. He smiled shyly as we passed each other on the corridor in a big-name media house, but rarely said more than ‘Hi!’. He sat at his desk, quietly working, his eyes behind his glinting glasses watching everything and everyone. When he spoke it was softly, seriously, usually hesitatingly. But once he got comfortable, he would smile more, laugh even and tell uncertain jokes. Leave him to work and the results were magic. They still are.

Once upon a time Baiju Parthan was an illustrator. Give him a story and those watchful eyes would gleam manically, the picture coming to life in his head with a healthy helping of the bizarre to add that other-worldly tadka.

His forte was funky-kinky images created for science and technology articles in print. And then he quit, emerging a while later as an artist with a show in a prestigious gallery. He explains this with “When I chose to put my life into art making, I was blindly following my gut feeling that told me if I do not make this choice I am going to be unhappy the rest of my life. My mental condition was similar to that of an extreme sports practitioner getting ready to leap off a cliff into a dark abyss with no assurance of the outcome, and yet unable to retreat.” No retreat was necessary, since that leap off his personal cliff grew into a reputation for work that is as cerebral as it is aesthetic, in demand at home and abroad. But Parthan is still low-profile and reticent in person, though delightfully articulate as a writer. “I think my tendency to cling to my privacy could be one reason I do not make a good candidate for interviews. You could call it being shy. The issue is, I am not comfortable revealing minute details of my personal life. And when I talk, I come across as nerdy and geeky rather than interesting and weird as expected of an artist. In the end that combination also gets me misquoted most of the time.” Also, “Ideally I would prefer my work to get visibility rather than my personal self.”

Parthan is not always comprehensible – the artist and his work often baffle the ordinary mind. Think of that aforementioned glint in the eyes and you wonder if he is doing it deliberately when he says something like: “My pet theory would be, art along with language is a technology for generating metaphors and symbols.” On translation, it seems far less daunting. “We convert raw existence into a meaningful life experience by applying or projecting metaphors and symbols onto sensory data. Art is that domain where a maximum number of metaphors and symbols are generated and disseminated for public consumption as an ongoing process.” He could have read this somewhere and tweaked it to suit, he says, or else “I must have derived it most probably from Harvard psychologist and psychedelic guru Tim Leary’s presentation of the seven neural circuits of the human bio-computer, which is a metaphoric presentation of the way we perceive reality. In short, the range of metaphors available to a person in the thinking process defines the texture and scope of the person’s reality experience.”

His initial training in science could have backed this, but Parthan is well aware that “being too analytical is the sure recipe for making lifeless art that does not resonate. So it is a balancing act of holding onto the clarity of logic exemplified in technology, without vapourising the presence of the mysterious and the intuitive in the arts.” He has indeed “bought into Marshal Mcluhan’s theory of technology being an extension of human physiology, and Terence Mckenna’s claim that digital media technology is actually a boundary dissolving shamanic catalyst of sorts that is leading us into transcending physical and material boundaries. And that kind of ideological positioning obviously makes it easy for me to bind the metaphysical to the technological.”

His initial work illustrating for print media taught him how to “survive working under insane and impossible deadlines. The work environment was like a laboratory where one got to demonstrate unwittingly to oneself that the best comes out when one is really up against the wall.” It was indeed “a good lesson, but it became some kind of a Pavlovian conditioning for me. Now I spend a considerable amount of time finding ways to drive myself against the wall so that what I believe to be the best comes out in my work.” Parthan also learned the habit of doing research, learning about “topics that I have no need to get into. I suppose I get hooked on to information trivia. But research is the backbone of my art practice, so it has had a positive fallout.”

His passion for science fiction has been a contributing factor. Initially his way to “turn the volume down of the tedium of the mundane”, it soon became a way for Parthan to gain “an expanded sense of the world. While my friends were reading literary classics and getting deeper insights into human nature, I was shooting across galaxies and hyper-dimensional wormholes at warp speed.” It led him to “ecological awareness and a generally non-anthropocentric view of the world.” Of course, he admits, “that also created a disconnect with my peer group”. It also led him to study philosophy and realise that “our various knowledge systems and disciplines, archaic as well as modern, reflect various facets of a very complex phenomenon we call reality. So within that kaleidoscopic rendering of the world I feel free to mix and amalgamate differing worldviews, and then present it through my art.” 

To those who know him, the artist who finds what he calls a ‘serotonin high’ in working, but does not consider himself a workaholic, is also fascinated by video games. He has studied computer game level design, but never actually plays any game for too long, preferring to be a “virtual tourist exploring the game world to appreciate the amazing graphics and level details”. 

The author is a Mumbai-based art critic