It’s all about the wonder

JUST as “Domains of Wonder: Selected Masterworks of Indian Painting” was set to open at the San Diego Museum of Art, art historian B.N. Goswamy took a stroll through the show with his co-curator, Caron Smith.

“Caron,” he recalled saying to her, “I think we made a mistake. As part of the design of the exhibition, after all the labels and the captions, we should have had a section with no labels, no explanation, no captions whatsoever. Allow people to see art for art, forget about the narrative, forget about what is going on and just look at it for its own sake.”

Indian paintings hanging in an American museum with no supporting text? No tales of the exploits of Krishna, the manifestations of Shiva? No identification of the members of Shah Jahan’s court? No translation of the Hamzanama?

Viewers unfamiliar with Indian history, myth and religion rely on such information the way drivers depend on maps and global positioning systems to orient themselves, to avoid getting lost. Yet getting lost in the work was precisely what Goswamy and Smith wanted for the show’s audience. They knew they had to give viewers a way in, but they were loath to assign a prescribed path -- through description, identification, explanation -- once there.

“When you stop asking the question, ‘What is it?’ you might start enjoying the work more,” Goswamy advised an auditorium full of museum docents soon after the show opened in October. “Ask instead, ‘What does it do? What does it do to me?’ ”

“Domains of Wonder” is the most comprehensive exhibition yet of the Edwin Binney III Collection of South Asian Art, regarded as one of the finest assemblies of Indian painting outside India. The 1,453-piece collection spans 10 centuries and represents an exhaustive number of Indian regions, schools and courts, from stylized renderings outlined in black on long, flat palm leaves, to intricate scenes of courtly splendor painted with pigments derived from saffron, indigo, malachite and coral. Some images are easily legible, such as “Portrait of Sultan Abul Hasan of Golconda, Standing”; others are more elusive, such as the conceptually schematic “A Pilgrimage of the Mind.”

Two smaller exhibitions culled from the Binney Collection (one of them traveling internationally) had been staged since the SDMA acquired the collection in 1990, but neither yielded an English-language catalog. In early 2001, a modest-sized gallery dedicated exclusively to showing works from the collection, about 25 at a time, opened on the museum’s second floor. “Domains of Wonder” showcases 124 paintings and two bound manuscripts and is accompanied by a fully illustrated 300-page catalog written by Goswamy. (“He wrote it,” said Smith, “but claims that we thought it. I defer to his far greater knowledge.”)

While such a large, thematically organized feature exhibition was a logical next step for the museum, even its curators question whether the familiar conventions of museum display serve the work well. Goswamy’s lament over not having a text-free zone in the show hints at the misgivings lurking beneath a hefty layer of curatorial pride. Smith, curator of Asian art at SDMA from 1997 to 2004 and now chief curator and deputy director of the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, where she was reached by telephone, is even more blunt: “Museology,” she asserted, “hasn’t caught up with or figured out how to serve this particular medium.”

Indian painting, with its complex narratives and esoteric references, puts standard museum practices to the test: How to make such mysterious work accessible? How to help audiences connect? How much information is too much? How to excite as well as educate?

Paintings meant to be savored

WHAT’S most important as a context for viewing Indian work “is a sense of intimacy, closeness to objects,” said the elegant, poetically inclined Goswamy in a conversation at the museum shortly before his return to India, where he is professor emeritus at Panjab University in Chandigarh. “There’s an inbuilt problem because these paintings were never meant to be seen hung on the wall.”

Indian paintings, usually fairly small, were intended to be held in the hand like a mirror, at an angle, 12 to 14 inches from the eye. They were originally viewed in small numbers and passed among a small, seated group -- “savored,” according to Goswamy.

Logistical impediments and the preservation responsibilities of museums would never allow such direct contact with the work today. Nor would museum professionals be likely to attempt an approximation of the experience, noted UC Berkeley art history professor Joanna Williams, who chaired a panel on “close looking” at a Southern Asian art symposium held at SDMA during the show’s opening weekend. Goswamy’s vision of a room of paintings sans text was “a brilliant idea,” she said by telephone, but she wasn’t surprised that it didn’t come to pass. She’s never seen it done.

“I think museums are resistant to doing something that breaks the pattern of labeled pictures on the wall. There is a big issue festering about whether exhibitions should be didactic and how much text there should be. Museum personnel can give you alternative viewpoints. Goswamy would like to make [a show] didactic without having wall texts, which kind of offends both camps.”

“Domains of Wonder” is ambitious in scale and scope, but that expansiveness can also prove daunting, even counterproductive, with works of this density and intensity. Goswamy and Smith both recommend experiencing the show in several small, digestible bites rather than a single gulp.

“You can really only take things a little at a time,” Smith said. “That’s the way the works of art were meant to be viewed. A whole array on a wall is sort of anathema.”

The 300-square-foot gallery that the museum permanently allotted to the Binney Collection makes for a viewing experience better suited to the intricate nature and small scale of paintings such as “King Nriga in the Form of a Lizard Is Trapped in a Dry Well” or “The Sports of Love,” Smith added. That gallery “is much more conducive to showing the art.” But in the museum world, as in the culture at large, bigger is presumed to mean better, and large shows telegraph significance in terms the public has come to expect.

“The desire was to show people something that said, ‘The collection is here, it’s great, look at it,’ ” said Smith. “It’s especially important for the local audience to recognize what’s there. It was necessary for people to see [the show] as a featured exhibition.”

Given a choice between displays of a museum’s permanent collection and a limited-time-only special exhibition, people flock toward the latter.

“We know that what people come to museums to see has to do with the prestige attached to what’s there. Museums create that value by featuring things and giving them their full spit and polish. I think the museum is trying to do that here.”

Within that blockbuster-style model -- large numbers, large spaces -- Smith and Goswamy sought a structure for the show that optimized direct visual engagement. They divided the work into eight sections, with headings such as “Terse Assertions: Jaina, Sultanate, and Other Works,” “Engaging With the Visible World: Mughal Paintings,” and “Clarity of Vision: Paintings from Pahari Workshops.”

“Even if I say so myself,” Goswamy said, “it’s a clever organization of the entire material that we picked, because there is, on the one hand, a loose chronology. We begin at the beginning and end toward the end. At the same time, we provide the viewer with a kind of hook, an entry to these pictures, by grouping them according to their leading characteristics.”

This way, Smith further explained, “people don’t have to think they need to learn history, just find some groups they like. The structure provides a kind of arc of time. You would perhaps subconsciously be absorbing a kind of sequence and direction. Our hopes really were that people would have some sense response to the works more than anything else.”

That relationship to the work, in fact, echoes the experience of collector Ed Binney himself. Binney had a doctorate in romance languages and was a trustee of the San Diego museum from 1976 until his death a decade later. He aimed to create a comprehensive collection, following a Noah’s-ark kind of strategy of acquiring at least a few good examples from every region, school or court in the history of Indian painting. His grandfather had founded Binney & Smith, the makers of Crayola crayons, providing Binney with ample resources to fund his quest.

“He did not know much about India,” Goswamy noted. “The mythology of India, the thought of India, I do not think deeply interested him. At the visual level, he was garnering things. Initially he trusted his advisors, then he developed a good eye of his own.”

A collector who relished the hunt

BINNEY was a highly competitive man, Goswamy recalled, having crossed paths with him at numerous conferences. He enjoyed the chase and the bargain, and the adventure of entering another culture not through academic inquiry but through the senses.

“For Binney, India was a domain of wonder. His paintings were a domain of wonder. He did not know much about them. Wonder is a very important element in Indian thought. The great thinkers of India privilege wonderment over all other sentiments. It’s something which comes very naturally. It’s not a querulous questioning, not a questioning that demands an answer.”

Answers, facts, dates and identifications are the standard lines of longitude and latitude that help a museum-goer navigate unfamiliar terrain. Though that kind of support is present in “Domains of Wonder,” Goswamy and Smith aspired to move viewers beyond information-gathering to a state of intuitive understanding. In a culture that worships size, speed and data over moments of grace, that task is formidable, conceded Goswamy.

“There’s a surfeit of information and a famine of understanding. But one lives in the hope that maybe through one phrase or one line of words, one single image, that you get excited about something. In Urdu poetry, we have a word called chatak. The chatak is the sound that a bud makes when it opens. Inaudible to the human ear, but it is there. That’s what the poet believes. He says, ‘I’m so in tune with nature, so close to nature, that when the bud made a chatak sound, I bent my ear and asked the question, “Were you talking to me?” ’ This chatak, this very faint, inaudible sound, notionally there, is what makes art come alive. We’re not talking about multitudes of people, but a few people getting excited by a few things. That is a beginning to me.”

*

‘Domains of Wonder: Selected Masterworks of Indian Painting’

Where: San Diego Museum of Art, 1450 El Prado, Balboa Park, San Diego

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays; closed Mondays

Ends: Jan. 22

Price: $4 to $10

Contact: (619) 232-7931, www.sdmart.org