Monday, September 25, 2006
Echoing footsteps on cold, stone floors.
So, Bangalore wasn't exactly impressing the pants off me. The rick drivers kept on proudly pointing out such local treasures as multiplexes and 8 lane highways. I wanted something old and fallingapart.
I found it in the Bangalore National History Museum.
I've said before that I'm quite unsentimental about old stuff, at least on an intellectual level. Still, I have a deep love for museums that I can't claim has nothing to do with growing up with the Indiana Jones movies on instant replay.
(This is a statue of the Surya, the chief solar deity in Hinduism, 12th Century AD. The picture's blurry coz I was sneaking a snap with my cellphone -- no pics allowed, of course.)
The detail, if you can't tell, is plainly nutty. Why would anyone work that hard at anything? I certainly wouldn't.
It's the kind of detail that demands a kind of madness, surely. Probably that flavour of madness we call "faith".
Very few of today's artists have the patience for it. Perhaps that's evidence that we live in a less mad time. Perhaps that's also evidence of how much delusion is part of who we are as a species. A species with not only the ability to imagine the unreal, but to believe it. And, on occasion, to make it real.
(A frieze of a buffalo and a winged horse. 1 - 2 Century, AD.)
This one gave me shivers. I doubt that the picture will, but the movement in this piece is incredible.
Just think, though: there must've been a lot of crap back then too. We've just had the good sense to save some of the good stuff.
I found it in the Bangalore National History Museum.
I've said before that I'm quite unsentimental about old stuff, at least on an intellectual level. Still, I have a deep love for museums that I can't claim has nothing to do with growing up with the Indiana Jones movies on instant replay.
(This is a statue of the Surya, the chief solar deity in Hinduism, 12th Century AD. The picture's blurry coz I was sneaking a snap with my cellphone -- no pics allowed, of course.)
The detail, if you can't tell, is plainly nutty. Why would anyone work that hard at anything? I certainly wouldn't.
It's the kind of detail that demands a kind of madness, surely. Probably that flavour of madness we call "faith".
Very few of today's artists have the patience for it. Perhaps that's evidence that we live in a less mad time. Perhaps that's also evidence of how much delusion is part of who we are as a species. A species with not only the ability to imagine the unreal, but to believe it. And, on occasion, to make it real.
(A frieze of a buffalo and a winged horse. 1 - 2 Century, AD.)
This one gave me shivers. I doubt that the picture will, but the movement in this piece is incredible.
Just think, though: there must've been a lot of crap back then too. We've just had the good sense to save some of the good stuff.
