Our distance between comic and conscience final

OUR APERTURE BETWEEN COMIC AND CONSCIENCE

OUR APERTURE BETWEEN COMIC AND CONSCIENCEBy Zanita Anuar

Ismail Hashim has always been and always will be our aperture.

This is a testament after twenty years of recognising a humble character, atruly complex photographer artist whose playground had been our photostudio at the National Art Gallery situated at the former Majestic Hotel.

The National Art Gallery building was situated right across from the Kuala Lumpur Railway Station. Each time we glanced from the office window there is still that ubiquitous silhouette of him walking hurriedly across the road to reach us which we could see from our mind’s eye. Boarding the trainfrom Penang was a simple ritual he would take to reach us. All we had to dowas wait. Each time we anticipated his visit, the cold stillness of the airwould fill with a warm sense of abandonment. Our staff would break in contagious chuckles as they recall the last encounter they had with him. And should the others look up at him to beg him to repeat his comic, he would never easily comply. He was one of the few artist who taught us the importance of being in the moment. He was at once a source of hearty laughter as much as he was a stoic keeper of time.

It is in respect of time, that we conceived the project called Docu 7 inNov 2010. Intent on catching up on lost time, the crew was giveninstructions to linger around the man and record him in the last seven daysbefore his retrospective show was to be opened in the Balai Seni LukisPulau Pinang. All these years we had wondered if the serendipitous acts ofpassing time could be aptly recorded in the assignment or ever useful tofellow researchers. The Unpack-Repack curator’s use of the documentationnow, five years later, is a testament in itself.

IMAGE 1

(still photo from DOKU 7)

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The central procedure of Unpack Repack is to superimpose anarray of extremely discontinuous found objects, and images insome Apollonian order within a controlled Dionysian passion,but presented in such a way as to offer viewers a sense ofdiscovering new found/ an untouched treasure.

The estate of Ismail Hashim is one point of entry and a verystrategic one at this moment, into a multidimensionalinclusive world of intertextual dialogism .The curator triesto project one set of history across another set of history insuch a way as to make diverse cultural experience concurrentand relatable within a logic of co-implication. A multicentric approach is his gesture toward socio-historical equityand clarity, almost re-envisioning an alternative politics ofculture.

As there are thirteen out of seventeen of the nationalcollection works chosen by the curator for the exhibition, itcan be conjured that the Ismail Hashim collection within thevaults of the National Art Gallery are quite representative indepicting even ‘re-envisioning ‘ our culture

Nonetheless one of the four works not selected, is the Sebatang 84, a very curious piece which was not included in the exhibition . Hence In this essay the importance of the work and the two related photo art portraits ,Muram serious and Bang Lah –dia is explored. This is an ode to this artist’s portrait works in the National Collection as well as a salute to his anthropologic aperture that has affected us when facing the image.

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Ismail Hashim reads people. He studied man and was truly anartist ethnographer, a visual anthropologist whose tool isthe camera and choice of media is photography.

How did he develop the skill? It was in 1960 that IsmailHashim embarked on learning a corpus of visual codes whichshaped and strengthened his inquiry into the study of manthrough signs, graphic art, languages and phonetics. This wasthe period when he served as the teacher in the school for thedeaf and on occasion would gingerly recall his phoneticacrobatics which he had to perform in the course of teachingat the Federation School for the Deaf.

This early drawing by him in the National Collection recordthis artists ‘most meaningful experience’ as his graphiterenders lines of values of humility , humanity and pride as ateacher. Picturing a community oblivious to any hullabaloo,the drawing of nine portraits of his deaf students facingvarious directions entitled Children produced in 1969,make for acompelling observation /record of his students. Each portrait,male and female, presumably of various ethnicities, is drawnwith such bold strokes portraying determination. His intentionwas to show off their strong and handsome features as theywere beautiful people in his minds eye .

The portraits of children seem almost regal and each hadbeen uniquely placed within the large format paper with acentral foreground portrait of a boy facing the viewerunabashedly. The artist’s concern seem to be in upholding theindividuality of each of his subjects whilst maintaining acomposition which depicted pride of his school children. Afterall these children had won prizes and received accolades inseveral National Art competitions.

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IMAGE 2 CHILDREN

As skilful as he was with the medium of drawing and painting,he preferred photography. Much has been written about hisforay into photography. We know well what the artist wasdoing, the next question should be, how was this artistthinking? How did he accommodate for capturing changes incontemporary thought?

A point of interest for me was to decipher how he accommodatedfor changes in contemporary thinking utilizing the samesubject of a man. I began to delve into enquiring on what hewas thinking when he approaches the same subject thrice, oncein 1974, next a decade later and finally in 2012.The artworkin question has a subject of a man who first made anappearance in Muram Serius or Gloomy Serious created1974.

Muram Serius

In Malaysia in the 1970s, a “conceptual revival” led byactivists, thinkers, and artists like Redza Piyadasa andSulaiman Esa prodded many to rethink material culture andvisuality via their Mystical Reality exposition / testimonial. Earlier on, Joseph Tan sought to connect fine art traditionswith pop culture elements from television, advertisements,films, and cartoons in his 1968, Love me in my Batik . Theacquisition of Muram Serius was in the same exercise theNational Art Gallery decided on Nirmala Shanmughalingam 1973Kenyataan 1 and Lee Kian Seng 1973 Mankind .

At the same time, art pedagogy in higher institutions oflearning namely USM and UiTm and MIA began to challengetraditional boundaries between media, combining paintedgestures with photography and printmaking; combining handmadeand readymade or mass-produced elements; and combiningobjects, images, and sometimes text to make new meanings

This was a time when producing art directly from—everydayitems, consumer goods, and mass media was expected of

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‘thinking artists’. Many Malaysian artists indulged in usingprimary colors ,especially red often straight from the can ortube. They adopted commercial methods like silkscreening, orproduced multiples of works, downplaying the artist’s hand andsubverting the idea of originality

In 1972, Ismail Hashim had registered into Robert C. Crockand TK Sabapathy’s art classes in the Universiti SainsMalaysia. The pieces produced in the years of his attaininghis degree are known to be of a certain studied style. Hencethe work Muram Serius or Gloomy Serious (1974) was produced as apiece of art photography which was deemed avant garde at thetime. It was as if the artist has had to subdue his veryjovial almost comic subject , his friend Abang Lah , tobecome a seriously good subject of fine art. A serioussacrifice of reality in the artifice of art. This context ofrepresentation is obviously weighted by the social turmoil ofthe times from a local (Post 13th May, National CulturalCongress) to the global level (post-Vietnam War, the CivilRights Movement for African Americans) .

The silkscreened picture frame of Muram Serius is broken into quadrants by a distinguishing red line. Within each quadrant, the character appears in the same pose, like a hardened Marlboro man who glances intensely at the viewer arousing curiosity. The choice of red marking the borders of the quadriptych further imposes on one’s vision a query if what one views is merely a window of a subject or a framing of a subject which without the red grid, may not seem so important.

Muram Serius – Gloomy Serious1974Suterasaring76 x 51 cm1974-027

The shift he forces upon the audience was also a shift of visual habit in approaching photographic images. Almost

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teasing one to stop believing in photographs the way it was presented in frames to be read one after another unfolding narrative as when one trails the negatives of photos to determine sequence of photographed events.

Sebatang ’84: Please Turn Over

When interviewed by Safriza (2010) l regarding when he started his photography career, he mentioned It started in 1973 . I had my own camera and studio .The photograph of an old man smoking a cigarettewas my first photographic piece that has artistic value

This statement may be a reference to the 1974 subject Muram Serius which has been reinstated ten years afterwards. Ismail Hashim was 44 years old when he produced a curious diptych photo. The work that was made on one piece of hand printed silver gelatin print presented two portraits, the first showed a man with a cigarette in his mouth, the second presents us with the same man smiling with a tooth

Photography at this point of time as seen through the eyes of this artist , has become the most loved medium for visual communication: picturing stories, ideas and feelings directly onto the senses. Now , the artist in his strive for innovation gestures to the audience to participate in his art..from a visual literacy level, the viewer while gazing atthe work titled Sebatang ’84 realizes that she or he has to follow literal instructions . At the corner left bottom of theart work is printed the Bahasa Melayu words SINGKAP DENGAN CERMAT which translates to ,” open/turn overleaf with care “. Writers and readers of the English language are accustomed to understand it as something similar to P.T.O .PTO is a writtenabbreviation for `please turn over'. One would write it at the bottom of a page to indicate that there is more writing onthe other side.

print which he explained in earnest to our staff at the National Art Gallery. Azidi Amin and Ismail Yaacob, my colleagues who have served in this institution since a bit over three decades ago recalls vividly the artist thinking in

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the creation of this work produced in 1984. They recall being informed by the artist that the ‘sebatang’ stands for :

i. sebatang rokok : a cigarette

ii. sebatang gigi : a tooth

iii. sebatang kara : a vagabond/a loner

Sebatang kara

The result is an unearthing of old habits old patterns of meaning that expose the arbitrariness of our common habits ,ofour perceived truths.

As I have argued elsewhere, specifically with respect to photography, new information technologies and imaging systems have had profound implications for the way we create, record, manipulate,circulate, store, interpret, remember, and use information. 2 In turn, archives are inevitably and inextricably implicated in such changes to the technological, intellectual, and social production, organization, and dissemination of knowledge.

Ismail Hashims experiments with the same subject , Bang Lah has been the most compellilng composition ever studied, by thecurator and the conservator in the national art gallery

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Sebatang ‘841984Fotografi 58.5 x 46.5 cm1984 -035

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Bang Lah – dia ‘ isap rokokdaun(ed.1/3) 1974/1984/2012Hand-tinted toned black and whitehand-print 34.5 x 40 cmBSVN2012.77 The coexistence yet fertile division betweenknowledge and experience is a productivetension in the rethinking of our understandingof photography

His full development of Banglah starting in 1974, revisited in 1984 and culminatingin 2012 is in a sense acharming visual biography on the changing composition of the ubiquitous man on the street in Penang .

Why 20 pieces of photographs the same man? In 2012 he observed that there are more Bangladesh workers than there arelocals on the streets of Penang. The subtle comment is cleverly present in the title Bang lah

A triple take featuring an eccentric yet cheerful man observedthrough his camera , he informed us that he had spent all 36 exposures of the film on this one man.

a conviction that visual images carry important social messages and that the facts they

transmit in visual form must be understood in social space andreal time.

Rose seeks to provide to readers, primarily students of visual culture, a “critical visual methodology,” defining “critical” to mean “an approach that thinks about the visual in terms of the cultural significance, social practices and power relations.” Her emphasis is on “meaning and significance,” and she examines “why it is important to consider visual images, why it is important to be

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critical about visual images, and why it is important to reflect on that critique.”

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WORK ON CONSCIENCE

the human voice can never reach the distance that is covered by the still small voice of conscience-Mahatma Ghandi 1869-1948

7. Bila perang Semua Orang Menderita BSVN 1998-017

, she refined this theory, resulting with the publication of Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials (2007). Her theory of critical visual methodology (CVM) could be applied in both quantitative and qualitative studies that include, but are not limited to: (a) content analysis, (b) semiology(i.e., semiotics), (c) psychoanalysis, (d) discourse analysis, (e) audience studies, (f) Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies Special Issue – January 2013 7 anthropological studies,and (g) photo-elicitation or photo–documentation research. In other words, this methodology can be utilized across broad fields of inquiry.

interpretation or meaning making. Rose also suggested within each ofthe three sites of interpretation for visual images there resides three modalities for image interpretation intertwined therein. A closer look at each of these components is in order and how these three disparate sites of image interpretation are simultaneously imbricated with these different modalities. The sites at which visual image interpretations eventuate are: (a) the site of image production, (b) the site of the image itself, and (c) the viewing site of audiences (Rose, 2007).

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The image’s subject is not necessarily the same as its subject matter (Faris-Belt, 2012), and the initial cataloging of the subjectmatter, therefore, is the starting point for any visual semiotic analysis. Operating at the first level of understanding is the subject matter content, which is simply known as denotation. The subject occurs at a second level of understanding, which is connotative, according to Barthes (1977). Additionally, Rose (2007) claimed, “many semiological [i.e., semiotic] studies therefore tend to concentrate on the image itself as the most important site of itsmeaning” (p. 76, emphasis in original). At the first level of interpretation of a photograph, the subject matter is addressed in order to develop understanding between signified, signifier, and sign, as typified within semiological studies. Furthermore, within semiotic analysis, the semiologist also needs to interrogate both the compositional and social modalities within the site of the imageto fully explicate meaning.

Yet, he has left enoughimages & memoriesto fill a National Gallery.

REFERENCES

Interviews with

1. Azidi Amin 12 April 2014

2 .Ismail Yaacob

3 Khazrul

4.marvin

Azlan

Aleysha

Rose, G. (2001), Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Interpreting Visual Materials, second edition, Sage.

Dorrian, M. and Rose, G. (eds) (2003) Deterritoralisations: Revisioning Landscape and Politics, Black Dog Press.

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Rose, G. (2007). Visual methodologies: An introduction to the interpretation of visual materials (2nd ed.). London: Sage.

Rose, G. (2012), Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, The Public and The Politics of Sentiment, Ashgate

Rose, G. (2012). Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials (3rd ed.). London: Sage

Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies Special Issue– January 2013 1 Critical Visual Methodology: Photographs and Narrative Text as a Visual Autoethnography Terry Ownby, University of Central Missouri, USA

One Last Goodbye(In memory of Ismail Hashim)Cecil Rajendra (June 22, 2013)

Safrizal Shahir …2010

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Documents

Our distance between comic and conscience final