Temple of the Future by Peter Bevan
Feb 2008

Language, Process and Context

As a fellow sculptor writing about Ganesh Gohain’s new work, I am conscious of our shared experience and sensibility towards form, the way we think is grounded in the material processes of sculpture. In this exhibition, there is much to say about those common experiences, but the work also challenges the viewer with complex metaphysical ideas and as simply another viewer, I must acknowledge those issues equally. I hope that the discipline of writing this essay will enable me to gain a fuller appreciation of his work and have some resonance in other viewers.

On the face of it, the works in this exhibition show the versatile techniques and varied imagery for which Ganesh is quite rightly well known but it seems to me, a distinctive feature is the overt references to Ancient Indian Art in the Indus Valley. Although historical references are made in previous work, they were predominately from his personal and family life. It is on this wider contextualising strategy, that I want to lay emphasis, since it resonates at the very heart of contemporary art practice, in the issue of cultural identity.

I propose to begin by examining the visual language he uses, secondly to discuss the thought processes he uses to guide the making of drawings and sculpture and finally, the wider historical context from which he both produces this work and in which, he envisages it will occupy a significant place.

Language : An abstract reality

Ganesh continues to work from personal memories and reflections, but in order for these subjective thoughts to have pertinence in the public realm they must be transformed by the language of art. They must undergo a kind of cleansing to remove inessential, idiosyncratic or nostalgic features, particular to the original inspiration, in order to move towards the general. He is not interested in the direct representation of private emotional states of mind but in a thoughtful reflection upon them, which may, through an articulate visual language, become intelligible to the viewer.

He is a consummate craftsman and uses his considerable hand skills to forge memories and reflections into an abstract language of form.

In the drawing, “A tree of Illusion”, the form of the tree is used as an archetype; it is indeed a primal and universal form. This image resembles the structure of a family tree, which is a diagram, emulating natural growth patterns to express long and complex relations. But it represents the whole coherent organism of a family, here are ancestors from the past, their descendents leading to the present time and quite naturally and logically, on the peripheries of the tree, the potential for future growth in new members, as yet unborn.

The artist’s adoption of the tree as a metaphor came after the kind of experience we have all had, of looking up through trees, mesmerised by the dense patterns of twigs and branches. However, his use of this image is symbolic, referring to the growth and development of his own life, continually extending new growth and accruing new experiences in all directions. Ganesh’s tree is like a macrocosmic system, enclosing dreams, reflections and thoughts in an abstract pattern of reciprocal relations.

From this point of view, although his work is a drawing with two dimensions, his concept is three-dimensional. It is a potent and optimistic metaphor shared with us visually and conceptually. Visual information about his direct experience under the tree has been translated into an abstract language of line. This is not a naturalistic drawing of a tree (a tree being looked at), but a drawing of logical and imaginative connections – a drawing of the artist’s mind.

If you want to achieve the existence of a tree,
Invest it with inner space, this space
That has its being in you. Surround it with compulsions,
It knows no bounds, and only really becomes a tree
If it takes its place in the heart of your renunciation.

This drawing is an abstraction; each twig and branch (each line) has a dependence on the one before and the one after, echoing the linear branching model of information-storage in computers and Ganesh brings to this image an appropriately graphic precision. The language he uses in his work is distilled at a fine balance between natural and ideal form, an abstract language appropriate for metaphysical discourse on being in relation to the world.

In the context of cultural history, the tree as a symbol of life is both ancient and universal, with tree myths extending from Scandinavia to Polynesia. In India for example, evidence can be seen in one of the earliest stone seals discovered in the Indus Valley, it can be found in the Bhagvad Gita, “They speak of an imperishable Asvattha (Pipal) tree with its roots above and branches below. Its leaves are the Vedas; he who knows the tree, is the knower of the Vedas”. The Yakshi is the indwelling spirit of the tree, seen carved at the entrances of many temples, and the Buddha chose the Bodhi tree as the place of his enlightenment.

Appropriation of this ubiquitous metaphor risks a slide into cliché, but Ganesh achieves the necessary authenticity by perceiving the tree in his imagination, as a form with which he can represent himself. Not in a self-portrait as a reflection of an “accident of nature” but as a total identification with nature. For the artist, this kind of visionary perception is vital, and so his working process is developed in such a way to continually provide access to it.

Process : through inner and outer Being

Like most artists, Ganesh works in typological series, collections of works with the same themes, in which gradual variation evolves in response to both internal and external stimuli. These spring from both natural and conceptual sources but in the process of translation into the abstract languages of drawing and sculpture, they merge into new metaphorical forms.

Working in typological series inevitably develops an internal rationale, which is self-generating – there are numerous alternative solutions to particular formal or practical problems, so in a series, one can pursue several variations simultaneously, which give rise to “branches” in different and often unforeseeable directions. In this process the work can gradually loosen the ties to its original starting point, but gain in conviction from the discipline of creative repetition. The drawing, “Towards the light”, is not a diagram, but an impression of movement giving an almost dizzying sensation of swimming through water. Here the metaphor is movement towards enlightenment, which appears somehow effortlessly fluid. In contrast, in the drawing, “Letter to Vadodara”, there are perhaps 10.000 leaves individually drawn, requiring an intensity of almost motionless concentration, reminiscent of meditation.

The natural world is full of potential symbols and artists and poets harvest this resource at will, separating the trivial from the essential, in order to “glean” and nurture a more inclusive meaning. In this way Ganesh selects phenomenal experiences from his memory on which he can reflect in metaphysical abstraction. He employs a range of archetypal forms such as, the Chair, the House, the Mountain, which have both a personal significance in his life and a universal resonance. E.g. the chair appears in many works, its scale sometimes has the significance of a throne but also functions as a pedestal in support of other sculptural elements; they simultaneously represent a personal memory of the chair of his father and his own studio chair used when thoughtfully conceiving his work – a thinker’s chair, a seat of learning.

Two such chairs support the, “Torsos from Vadodara I and II” which explore a dialogue between inner and outer form. The best of sculptures are those in which the “interior” is not questioned, where the volumes and masses are encompassed by the surface “perfectly”, so that questions like, “What is it like inside?” or “What is inside?” simply do not arise. Ganesh has an innate sensibility towards the interiors of volumes and possesses the ability that exceptional sculptors have; to think himself into forms. This is more than an anthropomorphic, ”seeing oneself” in nature and more like an intense dialogue between the two, through which, eventually a merging takes place.

Ganesh explores this transubstantiation in the metaphor of the cast sculpture and its moulds. The solid presence of a male figure stands before us in, “Torso from Vadodara I” but the same figure’s presence is implied in the cavities of the moulds from which it was cast (“Torso from Vadodara II”). The fact that these “moulds” are themselves, now cast into bronze confounds their original technical function and turns them into sculpture. The detailed figurative representation is “morphed” in the simplified volumes of the outer surfaces of the moulds, suggesting an evolution towards a pure form. Yet the implicit presence of the male figure in “Torso II” perhaps offers another version of a truth; that form is perceptible in the medium of air.

In a previous work, “Seed becomes Mountain”, 2005, Ganesh exhibited similar sculptural moulds, which were being prepared to cast a sculpture in the shape of a seed. When the moulds were separated and laid out, their forms and interior surfaces, suggested “mountain and valley” having for the artist, strong associations with a recent trip to Ladakh. In this case there was a metamorphosis of the proposed object’s identity, from seed to mountain. In the present work, it is not a metamorphic change but a transformation of the torso-as-object into a spatial “form”, perhaps closer to the pure idea of torso, and incidentally perhaps, closer to a total abstraction.

In “My Table”, the viewer’s attention is again drawn to aspects of the artist’s process, this time it is that quiet period of contemplation in between bouts of physical activity, when the artist sits down to appraise and review what he has done. On the “work table” stand bronze models, maquettes, three-dimensional studies; small but tangible “ideas” for potentially, larger sculpture. Yet scattered on the floor around the table and chair are over a hundred polished bronze eggs, each egg is archetypal, and like Brancusi’s “Beginning of the World”, a new sculpture-in-potential. This work is concerned with the future, predicting a bountiful, if as yet unknowable harvest.

This determination to always seek out elemental forms and deliberately avoid the representation of the appearance of reality implies that appearances are an illusion and undesirable as a subject for his art. This is remarkable in that it reflects both western Platonic thought and precepts of Indian aesthetics, exemplified in the writings of A.K.Coomeraswamy.

Granted that by restoring to the lotus all, or all we can, of those accidents that are proper to the lotus of the botanist, we produce an object apt to deceive an animal: what we have thus done is to make it clear that our reference is, and is only, to a natural species and not to an idea; our “work of art” is no longer creative, “imitating” an exemplary form, but merely a succedaneum, more or less apt to titillate the senses.

For Ganesh, there is a “typology” of forms in his mind and as a sculptor, the “craftsman’s hands” that are also in his mind, mould the tangible weight of objects before he even touches the material. He belongs to a family of artists of similar mind, past and present, who think through materials and forms, and accounts for how we can empathise with work made by ancient artists. It is not the particularities of time and place that we “recognise” as familiar, but the commonality in the language of form.

There are influences between artists who are millennia apart but who are familiars in the world of art. In this exhibition we are given overt references to ancient historical works, which suggests a desire in the artist not to be “bound” by the exigencies and demands of the present, but to locate his practice in the wider context of cultural history.

Context : the past, the present and the future

In Ganesh’s search for “truth” through the translation of naturalism into abstraction, his work takes on some of the characteristics of Minimalism. This can be described as a desire for the perfect artefact, an artefact that cannot be improved by the subtraction of any element; in such a work, every detail is condensed to what is essential. This discipline has a moral dimension too, in that it implies a certain calming of the ego and a rejection of “worldly” concerns, suggesting a similarity to the precepts of religious art with its tendency to respond to existential questions about meaning in life.

The framing of such questions and their answers change of course, in different historical and cultural contexts. The contemporary globalisation of markets (and art markets), stimulate anxious questions about the threat to our cultural identities and a consequential loss of meaning in our lives. In maintaining a cultural identity, it is natural to continually modify historical forms so that they function effectively in the present, in a sense, paradoxically, finding the “new” in the “old”.

I do not mean to suggest that Ganesh suffers such a loss, I think for him it is more a concern to further substantiate, the sense of identity his work already has. However, he has located in the most ancient culture of India (Fig.1), an inspirational resource for maintaining a cultural identity.



This famous object is an extraordinary archaeological discovery, unlike other contemporaneous finds in the Indus Valley, which have relationships with the art of Western Asia. In contrast, this torso shares certain characteristics with in later Indian Art, perhaps indicating a continuing indigenous culture. It is strikingly naturalistic for the period, subtly modelled with softly contoured transitions from one part of the body to another, using a non-linear, purely sculptural language. There is also the merest suggestion of an inclination of weight from one leg to the other, implying an immanence of movement. Its nudity is a mystery, unique in Indus Valley Art, as it is generally, in later Indian art. But its “effortless” pose was to become a well-recognised attribute of divinity in later Hindu and Buddhist sculpture, and one might add, in Archaic and Classical Greece.

Ganesh’s response, “Torso from Vadodara I”, is both a tribute to this icon and an expression of contemporary identity. He says …the sculptures should represent me, my body, soul, existence, inner and outer space. This sculpture, is equally, an extraordinary cultural statement, demonstrably “Indian” in bodily proportions, and in its archaic-like understatement of naturalistic appearance. It has the same aesthetic quality of “roundness” of form suggesting an inner, radiant energy held in effortless poise. It is an exceptional work in the context of contemporary Indian Art.



There is a unity of experience in his recognition of the Harappan torso, translated as it is, into the language of his modernity. The comparison is a likeness in form and monumentality in conception. They are both part of a long typological series, which is universal and created through the work of many artists. If surveyed, it would include e.g. from the Indian canon, the Mauryan Dynasty male figure of c. 300 BCE, (Fig.2) found in Patna, the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of Sarnath and Mathura and the torsos of Chola bronzes in Tamil Nadu. But if we accept the notion of the universal evolution of archetypes, we might include the torsos of Archaic Greek Kouroi, and those of Michelangelo and Rodin (although I admit a distinction in the type may be argued here).

In the visualisation of his “torso”, Ganesh did not seek insight from objective “models”, his own body was the objective source, nor did he go to the Harappan torso to copy an “ideal” form. He used his innate conceptual imaging to remodel this archetype. It is as though the principles of proportion in the Silpa Sastras were ingrained in his mind, or that he unconsciously followed the instruction of Coomeraswamy, i.e. “…if you want to know the angel you must be the angel.” Ganesh is completely identified with the torso. He is it.

This recognition of the familiar in a work over more than two millennia demonstrates the principle of sharing the same metaphysical form, the same ontological body, across time and across cultures. There is an extraordinary optimism in this recognition; in the way it suggests the immense potential of such relationships and it seems to me, that this evolution of work from archetypes opens up cross-cultural connections, which respect differences and similarities equally.

To conclude this meditation on the current work of Ganesh Gohain, I am drawn back to consider the title for the exhibition, “Temple of the Future”. On the face of it, this title may seem a little presumptuous. We are after all, in an art exhibition in the 21st century, what does it have to do with being in a temple?

But in thinking about what a “temple” could be i.e. from a sacred place, a shrine, a focus of worship, a special place, carefully ordained, in which sensitive activities are performed, a place for meditation on metaphysical questions, a “temple of learning”, a temple of art”. I begin to see the parallel that Ganesh is making. What is it, here in this “temple” that is of such vital importance to our lives? Surely not just the material objects on show, but rather, the “ideas” with which they are merged in such significant form, ideas about the very essence of life.

The individual “self” is not self-contained; it is relational both within its immediate context and in terms of the macrocosm of humanity, whose “family tree” includes all of us in an immense and complex “organism”. We are all genetically related and we should take care to maintain these relationships in equilibrium.

In this “Temple of the Future”, we are being asked to think about what is to come, but not in a passive mode. Our evolved relationships with the distant past suggest a continuum of energy, like Nature herself, and in the realisation that our present is the prodigy of our past; we must also acknowledge responsibility for building our future.

(The author is from Glasgow School of Art, Scotland)