Muhammad Zeeshan at the Sanat Initiative in Karachi explores a unique phenomenon in a show that was held for only three hours
In his book, The Success and Failure of Picasso, John Berger observes an interesting aspect about Picasso: "Just after the Second World War Picasso bought a house in the south of France and paid for it with one still-life, Picasso has now in fact transcended the need for money. Whatever he wishes to own, he can acquire by drawing it. The truth has become a little like the fable of Midas. Whatever Midas touched, turned into gold. Whatever Picasso puts a line round, can become his".
Recently, a fellow artist while driving a brand new car told me how he swapped one of his paintings for this car from a collector. The barter reaffirms the truth that art, despite being an experience of the sublime, an attempt to serve society’s intellectual needs and an expression of the artist’s angst, is primarily a utilitarian object. One can imagine the image-makers of yore receiving food, tools, and other items as payment for making idols for the community.
In the realm of art, the procedure is indirect. Here a work of art is bought with cash, and then that money is used to purchase other things. The artist in a way becomes a part of the market economy. No wonder, the worth of an artwork is determined by its monetary value. Artists negotiate on gallery commission, are often unhappy about it and occasionally make clandestine sales with clients. Not all of them are interested in merely marketing their works but the selling part is important.
The notion of a starving and struggling artist who keeps churning out work in spite of the public’s indifference and perpetual failure to earn through his art (classical example is the case of Vincent Van Gogh) appears romantic and outdated in contemporary circumstances. Today’s artist, like any other prosperous professional, is not just earning his livelihood from art but also investing in property, cars, cash, gold etc.
Now when art, at least to some extent, has become more about investing rather than investigating, many artists are commenting on this state of affairs. Even though they are a part of this process, their works are a form of critique on the custom of bracketing art with money. The recent exhibition of Muhammad Zeeshan at the Sanat Initiative in Karachi explored this phenomenon. The show is different from others for many reasons and marks a high point in the oeuvre of Zeeshan who was trained in miniature painting but has been exploring the world of images as ideas.
The show titled ‘Art Cash Hard Cash’ perplexed many due to the mystery surrounding it. It was held for three hours only on a day the Pakistani nation was celebrating the founding father Jinnah’s birthday -- on December 25, 2015. Holding an exhibition on a public holiday and Christmas seemed confusing but once the visitor was inside the gallery space, like pieces of a complex puzzle, every part was sorted out.
To commemorate the 139th birth anniversary of Quaid-e-Azam, a total of 139,000 rupees covered the gallery floor all with one-rupee coins and their heads (with Jinnah’s face) turned up. The viewer was bound to be taken aback looking at so many coins spread in such a worthless format. One-rupee coin is the lowest unit in Pakistan’s currency, usually ignored while trading or paying for something. By utilising this unit of currency to install his art, Zeeshan has commented both on the importance and the worthlessness of money. It was important because the artwork was made purely with cash and the guests were invited to bring "exact change in the form of a one Rupee coin and exchange it for a work"; and worthless because the money was laid on the floor, open for traders of art to tread on it.
One can read this work on multiple levels. ‘Art Cash Hard Cash’ can be connected with Jackson Pollock, since he removed the easel painting, placed his surfaces on the floor to express something new; and at the same instance Zeeshan’s work may be seen in the pictorial structure of Pointillism, in which a picture is divided into dots.
The dots inside the gallery space were not just layers of paint but metallic objects cast at Pakistan Mint. They were somehow precious items, because these bore the profile of the nation’s father on one side and the outlines of a mosque on the other side. By putting these as floor tiles, Zeeshan also questioned the virtue of money along with the validity of national symbols, and how art transcends the construction of identities, supremacies and sacredness associated with nationhood.
‘Art Cash Hard Cash’ was not an experiment but an experience in unearthing the delicate link between art and money. By diluting the difference in these two entities, the exhibition posed a question on the commercialisation of ideas and commodification of expression.
One hopes that what a viewer took with him after those three hours was not just a certain number of one rupee coins but art pieces of Muhammad Zeeshan which are enough for him to keep thinking on how the two are exchanged but can not be interchanged.