Indian Sculpture c6.s4: Reflective Attitude
Indian Sculpture c6.s4
- Language
- English
Reflective Attitude
c6.s4.1
Together with the extensive use of canons of appearance, the attitude towards the inner experience and towards creating now becomes conscious. A critical distance separates the thing visualised from the mode of creating it. In this gap, between inner experience and form, the artist now mirrors his own attitude towards both; not, however, as an individual, but subject to an unavoidable situation. From being entirely borne by the experience of nature, expansive and manifested, and again inflected and transubstantiated, Indian sculpture now has become reflective in its attitude.
c6.s4.2
The readiness for it was shown by a relief like that of Rāvaṇa shaking Kailāsa (Fig. 78). But there the elements of form themselves were still untouched, and only their relation foreshadowed psychological suggestiveness. The surroundings of the figures given human shape were made to envelop them and to resound in depth, and in light and darkness, according to their degree of vehemence or stillness. By referring them to the human figures they lost their independence and juxtaposition. They became expressive of the being and experience of the single figures, encompassing them each in its own world, and reflecting the inner situation or attitude of each of them.
c6.s4.3
The miracle of transubstantiation had become true long ago. This last possibility which the creative mind gives to nature is always remembered, is always experienced; but it is not the one and only experience. For with all its integrated power, the material upon which it relies, i.e. nature, remains unchanged, and so does the ceaseless movement of the inner life.
c6.s4.4
Now the state of the ‘in-look’ as a rule is left behind, and the eyes open once again and face the world. How can they face the world once more? They seem to keep it at a distance watchingly (Figs. 87, 88, 110), superciliously (Fig. 93), compassionately (Fig. 84), or else they seem so entirely filled with power and bliss (Figs. 99, 104, 113) that they swim in it glancelessly, open to the world like overbrimming pools. The latter, however, is only the case in such art provinces where artistic form remains conservative and untouched by the specifically mediæval problem.
c6.s4.5
The distance that now is being kept is of a different order from the aristocratic aloofness of the figures in Māmallapuram (p. 81). Whatever attitude they assumed—overbearing, submissive or amused (Figs. 71, 73)—it was the outcome of an inner state of innocence, of an unbroken sense of being.
c6.s4.6
But after the eighth century the glance, in order to reach the world, has first to pass the state of the in-look. With a lingering sense it goes out for something definite; but there is no such thing; there is nothing to be gone to; so that in compassion, or resignation (Fig. 84, 92), it sheds to the outside what it has seen within, and it is in this way that it fills the vast reflex of what it has beheld within—i.e. the world. Such an attitude has no solution. It is documented when the craftsman is able to give form to it. In definite and measured art-form an insoluble situation is stated. While the problem remains eternal its form in lavish number is grown on the soil of mediæval India.
c6.s4.7
By its existence it asserts creativeness as such, as the last and real, whatever its subject, the void or the veil of the within and the without. Creative form makes definite and full what as inner experience has just been relative and void. Not only is the smile that plays over some of the faces of mediæval figures seemingly inscrutably complex (Figs. 92, 93, 101), but their whole appearance is paradoxical, with a fullness of limbs oftentimes provokingly postured and a freedom from all that is sensual, a heroic coolness without effort (Figs. 87, 90). That such apparent contradictions are as they are, simultaneously and inseparably one, does not solve them, but that they have become form, straightaway and through all the safeguards and restrictions imposed, redeems them from separation and establishes a state beyond them.