Midnight Dreams: The Tragedy of a Lone Revolutionary

Author(s): Anita Dube

Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Issue 36 (Summer 2014), pp. 40-
53
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Central Saint Martins College
of Art and Design, University of the Arts London
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42 | Afterall

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K.P. Krishnakumar,
The Thief, 1985, Midnight Dreams: The Tragedy
painted fibreglass.
Courtesy Anita Dube of a Lone Revolutionary
Previous spread: — Anita Dube
K.P. Krishnakumar,
Untitled (Squatting
and Bust), 1985,
ink, watercolour
on paper,
38.1 × 55.88cm.
Courtesy Amrita
Jhaveri
As soon as I desire I ask to be considered.
I am not merely here and now, sealed
into thingness. I am for somewhere else
and for something else. I demand that
notice be taken of my negating activity
in so far as I peruse something other than
life; insofar as I do battle for the creation
of a human world — that is a world of
reciprocal recognitions. 1
— Frantz Fanon
As I sit down to write this paper on
K.P. Krishnakumar and the brief history
of the Indian Radical Painters and
Sculptors Association, popularly referred
to as the Radical Group, I think of Marina
Abramović’s performance Cleaning the
Mirror (1975), in which she sits scrubbing
a skeleton with soap solution. On my part,
Anita Dube, a member of the Radical
Association, reflects on the now mythic
figure of K.P. Krishnakumar and his
particular, ill-fated attempt to marry
Marxist thought with artistic practice.
it calls for an excavation: of a time and
place far away, in both a historical and
emotional sense. It is a vexing task for an
outsider like me, an upper-middle-class
woman from the north of India (two
significant categories in what we are going
to talk about); it is nothing but painful, to
say the least. Whatever I write cannot be
outside of caricature, so perhaps it is best
that I caricature myself, to start with.
A silence of more than twenty years
suggests the magnitude of the catastrophe.
Suicide is not a place one willingly visits;
there is no pleasure involved. It is the
most unhomely place of the abject, the
place where all dialogue stops and only
questions remain. Krishnakumar chose
it, in late December 1989, when all his
attempts at structuring his life and his
political consciousness had failed, as a
final triumphant and tragic gesture.
Earlier that month, and following
the Art Camp at Alapad,2 members of
the Group bitterly criticised where the
collective was heading in a calamitous
series of meetings. All the latent
contradictions within the Group erupted
violently, and a decision was taken to
disband and freeze activity for one year.
This was a fatal shock for Krishnakumar;
with his leadership in question, he ranted
and raged against this humiliation.
(Curiously and uncannily, 1989
historically marked the collapse of old-style
communist idealism in the dateline of the
world.)
‘…what is abject, on the contrary, the
jettisoned object, is radically excluded and
draws me toward the place where meaning
collapses […] It lies outside, beyond the
set and does not agree to the latter’s rules
of the game […] it beseeches a discharge,
a convulsion, a crying out. To each ego
its object, to each superego its abject.' 3
Krishnakumar could have walked
away, in the silence of a Zen scholar/
monk (something not so far from his
consciousness). But to suggest that would
be to forget that he suffered from palpable
symptoms of anxiety — manic depression
and stomach ulcers — in his last years,
and was too proud to reveal or treat this

1 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952, trans. Richard Philcox), New York: Grove Press, 2007,
quoted in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1994, p.8.
2 The Radical Group held an art workshop and camp in a small village named Alapad, in the Thrissur
district of Kerala, in early December 1989. They worked on paintings and sculptures along with local
art students. Villagers participated in discussions that focused on ideas of art and modernity, and
slides of pre-Renaissance paintings and René Magritte’s work were shown. Group members collected
donations from visitors.
3 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (trans. Leon S. Roudiez), New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982, p.2.

Artists: K.P. Krishnakumar | 43

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seriously. It would also ignore how utterly
sincere he was about the intoxicating idea
of revolutionary praxis as the anchoring
necessity in his life. It was his singular
brilliance and passion that were able to
transform his own struggle — pulling his
friends along — into a meteoric moment:
a gesture that despite its brevity continues
to impact the discourse on contemporary
Indian art in thorny, subversive ways. This
itself is vindication, and a tribute to him.
‘It also requires a shift of attention from
the political as a pedagogical ideological
practice to politics as the stressed
necessity of everyday life — politics as
a performativity…’ 4
Issues can be dealt with and theorised
more easily when they don’t touch your
life on the inside. This defines what
Krishnakumar in his persona and his
politics enunciated, both from within
and outside the Radical Group. It was not
his charm and charisma (those othering
bourgeois descriptors that seek to pluck
him out as the hero from the crowd)
so much as his tragic love (in the absence
of real reciprocal love) that allowed
for transference of ‘presence’ to his class
brothers and comrades that remains unique.
‘Is the language of theory merely another
power ploy of the culturally privileged
Western elite to produce a discourse of
the Other that reinforces its own power-
knowledge equation?’ 5
Even if he always complained that
his friends were not ready, that they were
too weak to really undertake the historical
task, and even if he wanted to quit and
pursue his own ambitions, he could not.
‘This then is the first definition of the tragic
hero: he is a man confined, a man who
cannot get out without dying, his limit is his
privilege, captivity his distinction.’ 6
In this paper I am using a structure of
quotation and commentary, not following
a chronological but rather a surreal
method, letting the mind dig up material
4 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, op. cit., p.15.
5 Ibid., pp.20—21.
6 Roland Barthes, ‘On Racine’, Barthes: Selected Writings (ed. Susan Sontag), New York: Fontana/Collins,
1982, p.174.
7 Walter Benjamin, ‘Moscow’ (trans. Edmund F.N. Jephcott), Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms,
Autobiographical Writings (ed. Peter Demetz), New York: Schocken Books, 1986, pp.97—98.
8 Ibid., p.98.
44 | Afterall
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as if from the unconscious. Happy for
the liberating value of the found (text)
fragment, in a montage with the ancient
form of the commentary, towards a
dialectics that can help break down myths,
I hope to reveal the concrete. I aim to
connect to Benjamin’s own fondness
for collecting quotations, using these as
questions, and commenting alongside
them in a kind of dialogue as reflection.
Endless conversation with my
friend C.K. Rajan in the years since
Krishnakumar's suicide (and subsequent
collapse of the Group) has helped me
to look at this catastrophe from as many
angles as possible, like a Cubist. And
nothing has aided me more than reading
Benjamin, precisely for his peculiar,
quasi-romantic call for solidarity
with the revolutionary struggle of
the proletariat, as the barometer of a
progressive intellectual attitude.
So, emblematically and paradoxically,
I open this section about the Radical Group
with a quotation from Benjamin’s essay
on Moscow.
‘Admittedly, the only real guarantee
of a correct understanding is to have chosen
your position before you came. In Russia
above all, you can only see if you have
already decided … But someone who
wishes to decide “on the basis of facts”
will find no basis in the facts.’ 7
‘However little one may know Russia, what
one learns is to observe and judge Europe
with the conscious knowledge of what is
going on in Russia. This is the first benefit
to the intelligent European in Russia.’ 8
Let us look at a brief history of the Group,
all of whose members, with the exception
of me, came from Kerala, a small coastal
state at the southwest tip of the Indian
subcontinent with a high rate of literacy.
Marxism was a habitual daily diet of its
youth and intelligentsia, with Marxist
governments periodically elected there.
Conservative official Marxism was
perpetually put under a microscope in
the 1970s and 80s, under the influence
of the revolutionary ideological position
K.P. Krishnakumar, of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-
Untitled, 1982, Leninist) and other affiliated groups.
ink on paper,
61 × 81cm framed. As young art students, Krishnakumar
The drawing reads and his friends — Alex Mathew, K.M.
‘Friend, we have Madhusudhanan, K.R. Karunakaran
to be vigilant, because
you won’t know and K. Reghunathan (who would all
when your eyes are join the Radical Group) and others such
going to be gouged as Surendran Nair, N.N. Rimzon and
out’ in Malayam.
Photograph: Jeevan Thomas — were plugged into
Christine Clinckx. this atmosphere, constantly debating
Courtesy Madhavan correct political and artistic attitudes
K.P. and M HKA,
Antwerp and denouncing reactionary ones.
They fought for rights to a better education
while studying at the Trivandrum
College of Art, and with the declaration
of Emergency in 1975 they began
participating in street protests through
political posters and other actions.
The problematic relationship between art
and politics became a passionate concern.
Art could no longer remain apolitical: it
needed to address conditions of marginality
and oppression along with the existential
dilemma of the individual. Linguistically
and emotionally, interwar German
Expressionism captured their imagination
9 See Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship (trans. George Collins), London: Verso Books, 2005.
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as a bridge to the faraway world of
international art.
The seed of the Radical Group’s
founding in 1987 lay in this youthful,
non-alienated comrade-time — what
Derrida calls a ‘Politics of Friendship’, 9
where the full, adult realities of capitalism
(individuality, competition, professional
success and marriage) had yet not
entered.
At that time in India, revolutionary
energy and Leninism proved more
compelling than did the negotiated terrain
of Marxism within the folds of parliamen-
tary democracy. Coming from the lower-
middle and working classes, material
conditions connected the group’s members
to the conditions of the peasant and the
proletariat in ways more immediate and
real than petit bourgeois routes of empathy
and solidarity.
‘Indeed what distinguishes the Bolshevik,
the Russian communist, from his Western
comrade is this unconditional readiness
for mobilisation. The material basis of his
Artists: K.P. Krishnakumar | 45
 K.P. Krishnakumar,
Vasco da Gama,
1984, cloth, wood,
plaster, enamel
paint. Courtesy
Anita Dube
and Siddharth
Photographix,
New Delhi

existence is so slender that he is prepared, of cultural history. This is why the

year in and year out, to decamp.’ 10
This is what marked their intervention
within the discourse of the visual arts in
India in the late 1980s. The empowered
idea of the margin, speaking for itself,
challenging the discursive hegemony at the
centre. This challenge was raised against
the cultural politics of the South-North axis,
and it placed class struggle at the fulcrum
‘Questions and Dialogue’ manifesto,
released during the Radical Group’s first
collective exhibition at the Baroda Faculty
of Fine Arts in March 1987, was received
like an anarchist bomb. 11
‘Must the project of our Liberationist
aesthetics be forever part of a totalising
Utopian vision of Being and History that
seeks to transcend the contradictions and

10 W. Benjamin, ‘Moscow’, op. cit., pp.97—98.

11 ‘Questions and Dialogue’ is a manifesto I wrote as a spokesperson for the Radical Group.

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ambivalences that constitute the very
structure of human subjectivity and its
systems of cultural representation?’ 12
‘Is our only way out of such dualism
(oppressor-oppressed/centre-periphery/
negative-positive) the espousal of an
implacable oppositionality or the invention
of an originary counter-myth of radical
purity?’ 13
Alongside the attractions of Marxism as an
ideology of liberation, art was equally and
primarily a proposition towards freedom.
Right from the beginning, in their choice
of artistic affiliations, they reached out
beyond subcontinental art history to
universal coordinates within high
modernism. A new and radical art was the
aspiration: a ‘good’ (in a Gramscian sense)
and ‘full’ (Krishnakumar’s favourite
adjective) intellectual life was the dream!
The idea of a formal group did not
exist in the beginning. After completing
studies in Trivandrum, Krishnakumar and
his friends ventured out to Shantiniketan
and Baroda, important centres for art
education in the north of India. Outside
their comfort zones and away from their
vital social networks, they felt, perhaps for
the first time, the alienating effects of the
bourgeois education system. Shantiniketan,
ostensibly Tagore’s liberal university,
seemed premodern and quasi-feudal,
The Radical Group entered
this hegemonic contestation.
They had neither the economic
nor structural means to sustain
themselves on a long-term
basis, and so their intervention
remained a gesture.
and Krishnakumar, who was studying
there, struggled with authority figures
who disapproved of his anarchist tendencies.
He made portraits of new acquaintances
in plaster and cement and numerous
drawings in India ink, and continued to
read furiously. He established a dialogue
— albeit not a smooth one — with the
daunting figure of K.G. Subramanyan and
a friendship with Sarbari Roy Chowdhury.
He was educating himself, reflecting,
testing the waters.
He began writing letters to friends
in Baroda and Kerala to keep a conversa-
tion going — a practice he was to continue
as long as he lived. It provided him an
immediate outlet for his thoughts on events,
people, books and ideas. Spontaneous
in tone while finely crafted, they carry
an extraordinary attention to language;
they are significant documents of his
restless genius.
Meanwhile his friends Mathew and
Madhushudhanan, studying at Baroda,
had made greater progress. They were on
the path of individuality, mixing narrative
with their existentially loaded expressionism.
After finishing studies at Shantiniketan,
Krishnakumar joined them, first at the
Kanoria Centre for Arts in Ahmedabad,
and then at Baroda.
In the early 1980s the Baroda Faculty
of Fine Arts was an informal laboratory
for a new interrogation of the ‘modern’
within contemporary Indian art. Within
a postcolonial frame of an authentic
location there was a concerted linguistic
and geographic search for roots. An
argument was mounted — via visiting
professor Timothy Hyman’s ideas in
support of British narrative painting,14
Kumar Sahani’s work on epic narration 15
and Geeta Kapur’s defence of her
colleagues’ paintings in the ‘Place for
People’ 16 exhibition — that challenged
the artist J. Swaminathan and his
influential ideas of a particular material
and mystical, almost-Gandhian form of
modernism, which attempted to connect
the consciousness of the village to the
urban. We can read the discursive terrain
in the visual arts at the time as a ground of
hegemonic contestations of multiple strains
of modernisms within contemporary
Indian art.

12 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, op. cit., p.19.

13 Ibid.
14 Timothy Hyman was a visiting professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda in 1981. He gave a series
of lectures on R.B. Kitaj, Peter de Francia and Pierre Bonnard, arguing for a return to narrative painting.
15 Kumar Shahani, eminent film-maker and scholar, presented a paper in Baroda in 1981, speaking of
the archetype and epic modes of narration. A student of Ritwik Ghatak, Kumar’s ideas came from his
study of Ghatak’s films.
16 The exhibition ‘Place for People’ at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay (9—15 November 1981)
and Rabindra Bhavan in New Delhi (21 November—3 December 1981), which Geeta Kapur helped
organise, included Bhupen Khakhar, Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Jogen Chowdhury, Vivan Sundaram,
Nalini Malani and Sudhir Patwardhan.

Artists: K.P. Krishnakumar | 47

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 As students and young artists in
Baroda, we were right in the middle of
this discursive churning. It’s important
to mention this because in articulating
another strain of modernism, the Radical
Group, prematurely and unwittingly,
entered this phenomenology of a hegemonic
contestation. They had neither the economic
nor structural means to sustain themselves
or their critique on a longer basis, and so
their intervention remained a gesture.
In 1986, Krishnakumar was preparing
for an international show to be held in
Geneva. 17 Already he had a sense of his
intellectual prowess and talent as an artist,
and was increasingly drawn to the idea
of a political group as a necessary form
for survival and struggle against the
hegemony of bourgeois ideology in the
north. Madhushudhanan, his close friend
and comrade, was his only accomplice in
envisioning the idea of the Radical Group
as an artist’s union for such a task.
By 1987, Krishnakumar set up a studio
in Baroda and was planning an exhibition
at the gallery inside the Faculty of Fine
Arts to formally announce the idea of the
Radical Group. His classmate-comrades
— Mathew, Madhushudhanan, Reghuna-
than and Karunakaran — along with an
older painter, K. Prabhakaran, formed its
core. Younger artists from the Trivandrum
College of Art — C. Pradeep, V.N. Jyothi
Basu, C.K. Rajan, T.K. Hareendran and
D. Alexander — were also invited to join.
This young set had organised an artists’
camp in a fishing village, culminating
in the exhibition ‘Painters with Fishermen’
(1985) at the Trivandrum student centre;
its radical mix of political understanding,
comradeship and artistic ambition was
something Krishnakumar admired and
envied. He wanted the Radical Group to
become the nucleus for such a Marxist
attempt to connect art with politics.
Discussions, mostly in Malayalam,
took place each evening at the tea shop
outside the Fine Art Faculty, extending
on to dinner, which Krishnakumar would
cook. He was the leader and ideologue:
someone who magnetised the informal
proceedings.
The Indian Radical Painters and
Sculptors Association announced its
presence with the manifesto ‘Questions
17 The group exhibition ‘Alekhya Darsan’ was curated by C. Raman Schlemmer at the Centre d’art
Contemporain, Geneva and travelled to Abbaye Royale, Fontevraud.
18 W. Benjamin, ‘1927’, Reflections, op. cit., pp.116—17.
19 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, op. cit., p.11.
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and Dialogue’ (which I wrote) at the
opening of the exhibition in Baroda in
March 1987. Calling for an alternative
‘philosophy of praxis’, it rejected and
critiqued the practices of the mainstream.
This went down badly with the painters
of the narrative movement, and heated
arguments broke out during the exhibition.
This was the first and last exhibition of
the group in the north.
‘It is this reversal of the power structure
that makes life here so heavy with content.
It is as complete in itself and rich in events,
as poor, and in the same breath as full
of prospects as a gold digger’s life on the
Klondike. […] True, a certain intoxication
can result, so that a life without meetings
and committees, debates, resolutions and
votes (and all these are wars or at least
manoeuvres of the will to power) can no
longer be imagined.’ 18
Born in Kuttippuram, a small town
in the Malappuram district of Kerala,
Krishnakumar was distantly related to
Edasseri Govindan Nair, an important
radical Malayalam poet of the 1960s.
He was interested in Nair’s legacy —
in the poetic gesture and use of mythical
imagery. Literature was always an
important source of inspiration, as a means
to step outside the limitations of a provincial
situation. Krishnakumar started with
all the naïve romance attached to being
an artist — he would say: ‘I was a Picasso
at sixteen…’, and he secretly identified
with the libidinous creative energy in the
Spanish painter. Kerala was at the forefront
of the project of translating twentieth-
century literature into local languages
(here, Malayalam), so for Krishnakumar
world literature was available in the
mother tongue. Meanwhile the vibrant
film-society culture in Kerala exposed
him to the marvels of world cinema.
‘Goethe suggests that the possibility of
a world literature arises from the cultural
confusion wrought by terrible wars and
mutual conflicts.’ 19
A deep conflict was present in the minds
of the young intellectuals in Kerala —
typical of petit bourgeois existence lived
K.P. Krishnakumar,
Boatman, 1986—87,
painted fibreglass.
Photograph:
Egon von Furstenberg.
Courtesy Anita Dube
and Siddharth
Photographix,
New Delhi

within the simulacra, in a Baudrillardian sexual difference. These drawings also

sense. Between the fascinating world of
modernity out there and the insular world
of their location and its particularities,
there was an abyss.
These were the contradictions
Krishnakumar lived out in his life and
work. If we look at the drawings from
1982—83, when he was at Trivandrum and
Shantiniketan, we notice that everything
is articulated through the immediacy of
a virile masculine self, often a beast-man
hybrid. If I read a type of abjection in this,
in the early 1980s this was probably more
a feeling of lack in terms of class, race and
contain many elements of form and figure
that appear in later sculptures such as
Vasco da Gama (1984), Boy Listening
(1985; since destroyed) and Flowers and
Revolution (1989). In some instances,
even the distortions in his later clay
modelling can be read within these
drawings.
Krishnakumar created wild drawings
reminiscent of German Expressionism.
There was a state of emergency in a
Benjaminian sense in everything that he
did (in the catalogue essay I wrote for the
‘Seven Young Sculptors’ show, organised

Artists: K.P. Krishnakumar | 49

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by Vivan Sundaram in 1985, I called
this, with my limited understanding,
a ‘frenzy’), 20 as if he was blasting
‘homogenous empty time’ or ‘the continuum
of history’ 21 from the inside — inscribing
himself within it in the act of making art.
‘The borderline work of culture demands
an encounter with “newness” that
is not part of the continuum of past and
present. It creates the sense of the new as
an insurgent act of cultural translation.’ 22
The drawn line was Krishnakumar’s
primary tool, and he exploited what a
brush dipped in ink could do. Fine lines,
thick, quick lines, smudges, silhouettes
were as if sculpted on paper. With primitive
means, he constructed a world in which
machines, plants and animals, men and
women, provincial and urban landscapes,
studio and domestic interiors existed
in an emotional miasma of a ‘contra-
modernity’. 23 Human dramas unfolded
here, within this unhomely world, as on a
proscenium. In one drawing, a sentence
written in Malayalam reads: ‘Friend, we
have to be vigilant, because you won’t know
when your eyes are going to be gouged out.’
‘Such cultures of a postcolonial contra-
modernity may be contingent to modernity,
discontinuous or in contention with it,
resistant to its oppressive assimiliationist
technologies; but they also deploy the
cultural hybridity of their borderline
conditions to “translate” and therefore
reinscribe the social imaginary of both
metropolis and modernity.’ 24
The sculptural portraits he made through-
out the early 1980s still modelled the face
and figure in the tradition of Rodin and
Ramkinkar Baij; they were then painted
over with enamel in primary colours,
applied as flat geometric shapes. His
attempt to bury the academic ghost through
the anarchist act of painting on traditionally
modelled forms resulted in a strange mix
of cubism and expressionism.
However, in 1984, while making the
sculpture Vasco da Gama at an artist camp
in Goa, he made a breakthrough, moving
towards the anarchic work he is best
known for. He achieved a fusion of
self with history and art history, using
ordinary poor materials like cloth, plaster
and enamel; dramatic distortion in the
modelling of the (seated) figure; primary
colours and agitated marks; and worked
on a monumental, public scale. Vasco da
Gama has an angular, bearded face, and
his right arm raises a cloth sail, recalling
the famous image from Sergei Eisenstein’s
film Ivan the Terrible of Ivan waiting
for the procession to invite him back
to Moscow. The figure’s other arm holds
a shell, a crystal mirror into which he
gazes. This work signalled Krishnakumar’s
arrival as the brilliant bad boy on the
contemporary Indian art scene of the
1980s.
Everything that he had done until then
came together in this work: the spontaneity
and freedom of combining disparate
materials, the linking of survival strategies
to poetic impulses (visible in the street life
in India) and the disregard for academic
niceties. Sculptures like Boy Listening
and Midday Dream (1985) connect
with Basquiat (although Krishnakumar
didn't know his work), with popular
folk toys from the subcontinent with
modernist angst via expressionism and
with a postmodern, postcolonial agency.
They carry no local colour as a marker
of identity, and speak clearly and directly
to every location: regional, national
and international. We need to examine
this position more closely.
After the publication of Edward
Said’s Orientalism in 1978, postcolonial
discourse erupted within US academic
institutions. Orientalism, Said theorised,
was the stereotyping lens through
which imperialism and neo-imperialism
ideologically viewed the ‘other’ to serve
their immediate interests. And this,
he said, had nothing to do with reality
and aspirations (both cultural and
political) in actual locations, which were
far more complex and bound to history
and change. 25
Krishnakumar attempted to activate
such a radical consciousness in his work.
In recognising and resisting ideological
conquest, he set in motion the urgency and

20 Anita Dube, Seven Young Sculptors (exh. cat.), New Delhi: Rabindra Bhavan, 1985, unpaginated.
21 W. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
(ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn), New York: Harcourt, 1968, p.263.
22 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, op. cit., p.11.
23 Ibid., p.6.
24 Ibid.
25 See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978), New York: Penguin, 2003.

50 | Afterall

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agency of the margin, which aimed not
only at declaring itself, but also staking
its claim on the highest spheres of thought.
Authenticity did not interest him, for it
seemed to fix the subject within history,
and involved guilt of some sort, rather
than aspiration.
I am particularly interested in
the value he placed on universalising
constructs as a paradoxical site of
revolutionary praxis. Local colour and
identity politics — even if they are sites of
resistance — become categories that allow
for consumption of the other within the
master-and-slave framework of capitalist
neo-imperialism.
Sculptures from the mid-1980s,
such as Thief and Rhinoceros (both
1985), recast his self into dark, dangerous,
antisocial characters. These are not
the glorious figures of labour, as in the
modernist sculpture of Ramkinkar Baij
or in the discourse of the left. They are
edgy, naked, sexual, cunning, proletarian
figures, connected to Bertolt Brecht
and Jean Genet, as well as to the types
Krishnakumar knew from his own milieu.
His choices clearly indicate his distaste
for petit bourgeois sentimentality. Thief
declares racial presence in the way his
body is painted a dark rust-red; political
presence in his diagonally raised arm;
sexual presence in his naked stance; and
sensual presence in the clay’s modelling.
Certainly Rodin’s Balzac, étude de nu
(Balzac, Nude, 1892—93) is a reference,
but Thief also seizes the moment for a
repressed radicality to emerge. Rhinoceros
stretches this subversiveness further.
It connects Eugène Ionesco’s play to
Picasso’s body structure to the blue body
and yellow dhoti of Krishna — and all this
to a street performer! In Krishnakumar’s
Brechtian burlesque, the figure named
Rhinoceros rides a makeshift cart for
transporting goods and raises his hand
in a gesture mimicking a gun, his thumb
also becoming the rhinoceros’s horn.
It’s all there: the black humour, the little-
big self, the intellectual rigour and the
local, religious lineage, which, rather
than becoming spiritually sublimating,
is asserted sexually.
‘…the Constructivists, Suprematists,
Abstractivists, who under wartime
communism put their graphic propaganda
26 W. Benjamin, ‘1927’, op. cit., p.121.
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at the service of the Revolution, have long
since been dismissed. Today only banal
clarity is demanded.’ 26
In Boatman (1986—87), we see a highly
materialist sculpture that fuses the means
of production, signalled via the fishing
boat, with the body of the fisherman.
Made from the same fleshy substance,
the boat forms the lower part of the
figure’s body; its lower arm and hand
metamorphose into an unfinished,
animalistic lump that, while recalling
Francis Bacon’s anatomical distortions,
is the oar with which the fisherman
rows. There is a propelling energy in the
gesture that poetically and ambiguously
extends into space, transforming it into
a meta-gesture, or a metaphysics of the
gesture. The figure’s dark skin is the colour
of wood that has lain in the waters for a
long time. In the fusion of such disparate
elements an archetype is reached: no
sentimentality or illustration attends the
political in this universal figure of labour.
Young Man Listening (1986—87),
a sculpture of a man below a yellow
tree, seeks something else: classicism
and affirmative purity in the connection
between man and nature. A poetic element
emerges, which was not present earlier,
in the way one hand extends out into
space as if it were dancing. The tree, even
if bare, signals a potentiality for harmony,
celebrating the peasantry.
Even for Krishnakumar it was not easy
to sustain his early level of subversiveness.
It seems, looking back at his work, that
the ‘radical’ is not a practice to be chased,
or even a pure interior condition to
safeguard. It is elusive, and sparks in a
moment of crisis (as Benjamin noted),
to critically alter the landscape within its
sphere of action. Historically it generates
revolutions in the macro-sphere when
the history of repression has reached
a critical point, and where the organisation
of the masses and its leadership can
seize the moment. In the micro-individual
sphere it produces formal breakthroughs,
as chance and necessity come together
to change situations or systems
irreversibly.
‘Formal controversies still played a not
inconsiderable part at the time of the civil
war. Now they have fallen silent. Today
Artists: K.P. Krishnakumar | 51

it is official doctrine that subject matter,
not form, decides the revolutionary or
counter-revolutionary attitude of a work.’ 27
I must point out that all Krishnakumar’s
key works were done before the Radical
Group was formalised. Earlier, as an
informal group, there was greater
camaraderie, solidarity and debate around
issues of art and politics. With formalisation
and exclusivity premised on slippery
grounds and reactionary aesthetics, one by
one the group began to lose its artists until
Krishnakumar’s authority became absolute
around a set of followers.
As we look at the later work he did,
it becomes clear that instead of energising
him, the group deflated him. He ended up
repeating himself. The little blue Boatman
27 Ibid., p.120.
52 | Afterall
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K.P. Krishnakumar,
Young Man
Listening, 1986—87,
painted fibreglass.
Photograph:
Egon von Furstenberg.
Courtesy Anita Dube
and Siddharth
Photographix,
New Delhi
II (1988) is a caricature of the earlier
one. An adolescent sexual gesture places
him sarcastically in the middle of male
dystopia, revealing the repressed gender
equations within Kerala. Another later
sculpture, MIG 28 (1988), is a mere shadow
of Young Man Listening. The poetic hand
that we spoke about earlier now merely
measures and mimes a fish or a fighter
aircraft while shielding his nudity.
Where was that place of fullness and
freedom that he wanted?
One of the very late works shows an
effort to revive the earlier anarchic spirit.
Flowers and Revolution is an architectural
structure — a Cubist-Constructivist form
— amidst foliage constructed out of wire
cloth and resin. A red sphere sits on a small
platform: dreaming revolution. In its raw
simplicity and materiality, and within
a mythology of revolutionary struggles,
this work can be a celebration of a dream,
even a dream too far. As a lone revolutionary
it was Krishnakumar’s curtain call.
The Radical Group was not a cultural
wing of any ultra-left party, and it had
no financial support mechanism in
place. Lacking a strategy for survival, the
sincerity of the attachment to revolutionary
idealism seems like an anachronism today.
For a while a few members sold family
land, but when these resources dried up,
Krishnakumar turned to the hordes of
literate, Marxist, directionless youth in
need of a daily fix of revolutionary rhetoric
for survival. In this trade-off he was
trapped in their nostalgic dream.
It must be acknowledged that
Krishnakumar could have made a pact with
the devil, like Mephistopheles did. Had he
chosen to peruse the individual path of his
talent, adjusting with art-market demands,
he might have been a shooting star! The
success of the group exhibition ‘Alekhya
Darsan’ in Europe in 1987 was poised to
catapult him into international recognition,
and we know that he had secretly worked
for this. But ill luck — that Benjaminian
hunchback — knocked at his door. Fire
broke out in the exhibition, burning down
all the work. He was back to square one.
Having alienated his (bourgeois)
friends in the north — especially Vivan
Sundaram, Bhupen Khakkar and Rekha
Rodwittiya — who had helped him in the
critical years, he had nowhere to go, and
hardly any money to survive. He returned
to his family in Kuttippuram, and to the
Radical Group.
‘…for propaganda purposes, a grotesque
image of the bourgeois type is constructed.
In reality the image is often merely
ridiculous, the discipline and competence
of the adversary being overlooked.
In this distorted view of the bourgeois,
a nationalist moment is present.’ 28
A large group exhibition, including works
by group members and other friends
from Kerala, was organised in the town
28 Ibid., p.116.
29 W. Benjamin, ‘Conversations with Brecht’, Reflections, op. cit., p.209.
An earlier version of this essay was presented at the seminar ‘Questions & Dialogues: A Radical Manifesto',
organised by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway and CoLab Art & Architecture at the School of Art and
Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi on 16 January 2010.
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All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
hall in Calicut in 1988: ‘Artists Against a
Reactionary Aesthetic Sensibility’. Given its
public location and populist slant, a record
number of young intellectuals and local
people visited the show. Another artistic
praxis was set in motion in the local sphere,
and Krishnakumar worked ceaselessly to
transform this moment into a movement.
The possibility of an alternative
revolutionary praxis was now a survival
need that had to be transformed into a
triumph. It became for Krishnakumar a
form of redemption — after having seduced
the bourgeois imagination as the bad boy
— but also meant martyrdom. The return to
Kerala was a sacrificial offering of himself
to revolutionary idealism.
I remember a clay work Krishnakumar
was doing at the time of his suicide:
the biggest work he had ever done. At a
time when there was not enough energy
to think or money to live with a minimum
of decency — let alone make a plaster
mould — six or seven male figures arose
like catastrophic towers. If he surrendered
the narcissism of the vital self, it was to
the emptiness of the horde.
‘Things must go wrong for the petit
bourgeois. His situation is Kafka’s. But
whereas the type of petit-bourgeois current
today — that is, the fascist — decides in
the face of this situation to exert his iron,
indomitable will, Kafka hardly resists;
he is wise. Where the fascist imposes
heroism, he poses questions.’ 29
Artists: K.P. Krishnakumar | 53