art is unsuitable

] Art is unsuitable as means to survive - article by Rabbi Shergill
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Publication: Economic Times Mumbai
Date: Mar 21, 2010
Section: Music & Faith

GUEST COLUMN

Art is unsuitable as means to survive
NEWER ART FORMS WILL CONTINUE TO APPEAR AS AND WHEN NEW REALITIES EMERGE

Rabbi SHERGILL Singer and musician

WHILE growing up, I often felt small,
insignificant and an outsider. I wanted to
transcend all that. I didn’t want to accept a
lifetime of ‘ordinariness’ . I was forever looking
for a way out and on September 30, 1988 Bruce
Springsteen showed it to me and thousands of
other Delhiites. Now that I’d had a peek into the
other world, nothing was going to come between my
deliverance and me. As for the big placard of
‘Sufi Singer’ that is constantly hung around my
neck, let me state that in my first album there
are eight tracks of utterly un-Sufi content and
there’s just one out and out Sufi song there. The
constant reiteration of this moniker by the media
creates a false perception on the part of those
who come to my concerts or reach out to my music by other means.

Art, I feel, is inherently unsuitable to
being a stable means of survival and I’ve
experienced that first hand. We should be
dependent on nature and all should have an equal
access to its fruits. Only then can art really be
just be itself and not become a means of
expressing one neurosis or the other of a
dysfunctional society. It can also then be more
spontaneous. I mean one shouldn’t have to go
serve a master for 15 years to ‘know’ music. All
this stress on specialisation, a studied artistic
expression, I feel, kills the human spirit. I
think the river sings, the breeze sings, February
mornings sing. All this classicity, tonality,
pedagogy and ‘music’ have killed sound. And silence.
[]

I try not to think in terms of career and
productivity. That way I feel I am counting the
grains of sand on a beach and not enjoying being
on the beach. But yes, I’ve known anxiety; it’s
just that now I know it’s a consequence of our
conditioning and not a cosmic default. So as long
as young people are told they have to ‘become’
something, play this game of collecting points
for 40 years and exchange them for a 3BHK house
in the suburbs later, they will feel anxious.
When time ¬ an abstract notion ¬ is presented as
an ever decreasing resource, life will be filled
with anxiety. I sometimes feel that the question
¬ whether artists have to struggle? ¬ is
problematic in itself. Heck! Everyone struggles.
Question is why modern living is such a struggle?
It’s the latter that needs answering.

Increasingly, now music and art are being
sponsored and patronised by capital. But capital
is not people and when capital must extend its
graces, it’s a sure sign that people have
retracted theirs. Such patronisation also creates
a dependency. Besides, it goads the artists and
musicians to align their art in line with the
tastes of the patrons. So ultimately art becomes
a commodity, to be sold, traded and exchanged for
a decent life. In any case capital rescuing art
is ironic in itself in that it is the chain
reaction triggered by capital that kills it in the first place.

Also I am not a great believer in nurturing
or tutoring people to express themselves. That I
believe is merely reinforcing hegemony of
existing forms. Should art have priority over
form or vice versa? Forms come out of our
existing patterns of thought ¬ our reality. To
me, it seems that newer forms will continually
appear as and when new realities emerge. Now the
question is ¬ who should have control over
changing our reality ¬ unmanipulated human will or capital?





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