Overview

His turban.

His lines.

His dirty sex.

It’s all on record – paper, video, matchboxes, Instagram accounts – a tiny, turbaned GS is scripted into this world with a black pen. I look in laughter and then sigh in sadness. This GS is and is not Gagan Singh; that gap is worth holding on to for it is an opening. From here, we can hear the artist tell us, “Follow the line, not me.” From here, we can feel the ripples of emotion that arise in seeing a small man navigate this absurd world on a street named “Baba Gagan Deep Singh Marg,” a muddle at times (“Help me I’m stuck in this pipe….”) and at others, a raw, piercing erotic connection between the pen and the paper (“What the fuck? Who laminates their work?”) or an immensely flexible penis-tongue that wants the woman-world’s ras. A chain of holes and insertions, the body all mouth, eyes, hands, legs, dirty drawings…enough…well almost.

He has a thing for stairs too; ladders to climb, stairs to describe, steps that become feet. They keep shifting on paper and in the world and the ambition for self-knowledge is a slippery line between desire and disaster, a mistake in proprioception. Sometimes a tumbling chain of sexing people in the middle of a long piece of paper is better than wondering where all this up and down is headed. Only a stair stopper or drawing works, and the artist has made both. Sometimes the best way to save the world might be to save yourself.

Much of Gagan Singh’s drawing happens in passing (“when i’m walking i’m not drawing in the sketchbook. Here i’ve noticed i see differently”). Either the world and his attention or both are moving and, in that motion, the pressure to observe, recognize and react happens on paper. In a few hours at a coffee shop or a Metro station, his lines can become sketchy, frictive or anxious. Or in a moment of grace, even temporarily consolidate understanding but just barely. Alone in his studio, the artist sits in a wheeled chair and glides the pen on a piece of paper working in sections over many days till a scroll emerges to make continuity of space and form. Paper is the world, the pressure the artist exerts with his pen is seismic, and then it is a matter of will, interest and endurance. If those small drawings are short gasps that are uttered or sprints that are run in the social space that a blank white sheet offers, the long drawing is a marathon. All of life might come down to a choice of lines. The handles we hold might turn towards violence or love, and it’s hard to tell but we might learn by drawing. At least, that’s how I think the artist sees it.

Gagan Singh’s drawing is analogical; it invites comparison to find similarity but holds difference too, say between paper and the world (“there is lot of it but you only get so much now”) or between line and thought or emotion (“find the difference, if you can”) or a Sikh and a neighbor (“please no burning”) or my body and yours (“when should it matter?”). The opposite of analogue is imagined to be the digital — one arraying values in a continuous wave, the other a limited numerical code (often binary) — but the common goal is to make sense. A single line, a small drawing is a discrete thought converts into a continuous, longer proposition. It is in the artist’s hands, full, full, full in the making — “Wherever I draw, there I am.”

~ Annapurna Garimella on Gagan Singh’s Art