Satish Gujral

Ivan Klein
March 2020

Satish Gujral, Christ In The Desert (1960)

We enter Joshua Tree National Park at the southern edge of the Mojave Desert near sunset, my son David at the wheel of a rented SUV, my wife and daughter-in-law with us. His idea was to get there just after sunset and catch the stars come out in the clear desert air.

The eponymous trees of the park, graceful and slender with their branches raised in such a way as to remind pioneering  Mormons passing through of the great leader of the Hebrews with his arms raised in prayer, or of the signal he gave with his outstretched spear to his men hiding in ambush, ready to take the city of Ai.

Some of these trees, more properly understood as marvelously adaptive cactus plants, vandalized during the 2017 government shutdown when park workers were not on the job. And there, as twilight took its brief hold, I did wonder about the delicate relationship of man with his very self and the world from which he and those plants have arisen.

Traveling deeper in the park, we pass the otherworldly rock and sand formations that have prompted comparisons with the Martian landscape as photographed by NASA. There are roadside displays that discuss the people called the Pima Indians who dwelt there nine thousand years ago in what was then an abundant, watered land. People who left no art or artifacts that survive and are known only by the bits of tools and bone that have been found.

Home now to seven varieties of rattlesnakes and other serious night crawlers. There is an almost perfect stillness over this now faintly starlit wasteland, and I think we all felt the aura of those ancient inhabitants of this very place upon us. – How different from us in their essence could they have been? Did they tell lies to each other and call them myth and/or belief? Did they use up today as if there were no tomorrows? — Succumb to a more or less constant death anxiety and remain at war with their own hearts? Or did they, in this vast open space, achieve a greater harmony with earth and sky, with their very soul breaths? — No answers in the great silence around us.

We fly back to New York just in time to catch the “Modernisms” exhibit of mid-twentieth century Turkish, Iranian and Indian art at NYU’s Grey Gallery before it closes. Perhaps it was the memory of being in the Mojave at dusk, but the Indian artist Satish Gujral’s “Christ in the Desert” immediately stops the visitor in his tracks. His Jesus, represented by a Cubist mask of a face, is asleep in what I take to be an oneiric version of the Judean wilderness. Violet shadows are thrown over the desert in such a way that they seem to emanate from the consciousness of this abstracted and supremely sad rendition of Christ. There are shadows that seem to pre-figure the cross and the image of a sliver of the actual cross to come.

Has he started his forty day fast?

Has he been tempted yet by that smooth talking Satan of the gospels of Matthew and Luke?

There is only that disembodied mask to go on, with its thick unhappy parallel lines on both sides; its one oval eye faces us from the right and the merest asymmetrical suggestion of such an eye is on the left.

The mouth of the mask wears a deep frown, and we can only guess at the suffering that has gone into its creation. Perhaps its maker meant to convey a pain and bewilderment that can fairly make it seem as close to tears for us all.

•

Satish Gujral (b. 1925) is a  painter, author and architect. He was afflicted with a hearing impairment for much of his life and took up art at least partly as a result. Gujral studied in Mexico during the 1950s with the renowned muralists Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros. He has been honored as an artist by the Indian government and was named Man of the Year by NDTV in 2014.

•

Ivan Klein published Toward Melville, a book of poems from New Feral Press, in July 2018. Previously published Alternatives to Silence from Starfire Press and the chapbook Some Paintings by Koho & A Flower Of My Own from Sisyphus Press. His work has been published in the Forward, Urban Graffiti, Otoliths, and numerous other periodicals.