“Artists and citizens must consciously try to break free of their comfort zones to become engaging participants in a creative experience. They have to rewire the way they see themselves and the more they do it, the more fascinating society will be,” vocalist T.M. Krishna has said.
The noted musician, who has received both accolades and brickbats for his indulgent activism, which is seen by many as unbecoming of a Carnatic vocalist, pointed to the need for artists to be “disruptive” in order to “empathise” with and be a participant in a shared aesthetic experience.
“Willed disruption holds the key for a citizen to participate in the process of democracy, while for the artist, it is needed to engage with society. The roles just fuse into one another when there is an attempt to challenge and question the violence that is within and outside,” said Mr. Krishna while delivering the T.K. Ramachandran memorial lecture on ‘the artist as citizen and the citizen as artist’, organised by the Friends of TKR.
Set notions and practices, he said, made artistic expression and reception look more like a transaction, with a captive audience reaffirming their faith in the artist, who would feel good.
“Artists will be better citizens if they tried to move away from comfort zones to a position of ‘vulnerability’,” he added, relating his experience of holding an otherwise exalted Carnatic concert on a fishing beach — obviously out of a Carnatic vocalists’ comfort zone and where a seasoned listener of the Carnatic music genre would rub shoulders, and maybe even strike a conversation, with someone who would find the concert horrible.
Disruption could also be brought about, in music for instance, by rearranging the hierarchical seating position of the vocalist and accompanists on stage and also by infusing fresh, contemporary content into the concert. Mr. Krishna recalled a concert he gave in Coimbatore in which lyrics penned by Perumal Murugan during his period of silence after his Madhorubhagan (One Part Woman) came under attack predominantly from the Gounder community, were sung by him before an audience comprising Gounders. The verses, in praise of Madhorubhagan, were being received well when Mr. Krishna unsettled them by saying that they were penned by Mr. Murugan.
New experience
A critic of folk, classical divisions for art, Mr. Krishna said: “Real aesthetic experience of an art form would only be possible if we dumped our set aesthetic notions. The real experience of beauty is only possible through empathy, and it is imperative to dump a habituated idea of beauty to enter the beauty of a new form and experience it.”
An art experience had an underlying idea of democracy, with its ability to express, share, interpret, rediscover, and reconcile with the conflicts arising from disagreement. While it is easy for a practitioner of a privileged art form to shun his/her identity, an artist from a marginalised community will have to uphold it, which brings to the fore the inherent inequality in art appreciation and how well this can be negotiated, he added.
