But it was ok for I could still go to “Little England” or Nuwara Eliya, the quaint little town right at top of the hills that according to many, resembled England during Victorian times. So I took the train on the “Main Line” to visit the hilly part of the country which had a climate completely different from other parts. The railway station in Fort, the biggest on the Island is said to be designed to look like the Victoria station in Manchester. The buildings really remind you of colonial times though I’ve never lived during Colonial times. The smell of the wooden sleepers and the diesel somehow adds to this feeling. Time seems to have stopped in the 1920s as far as railway stations were concerned in Sri Lanka.
The hoot of the train’s horn shook me from my thoughts, and I stumbled into the train almost falling into the track. The seats aren’t uncomfortable in the second-class compartment. A group of people were enjoying themselves singing and they even had a guitar. It seemed that most of them were drunk and it was great, my only regret was I couldn’t join them. It must be a great feeling to climb a mountain by train while being drunk.
I looked out and I could see the incredible trees that Sri Lanka is blessed with. I am a person who pretends to be a botanist although I only have a passing knowledge of trees. There near a lake were the majestic Kumbuk trees that always seemed to enjoy the water. Then there were the very large beautiful Mara trees which bloomed full of pink flowers around March/April. The paddy fields were greener than the greenest green trees you have ever seen or ever going to see. Then we started ascending and the weird feeling of the train struggling through the hills. The picturesque mountains with perfectly trimmed tea bushes look more like fairy tale paintings in a book than actual mountains.
George Orwell once wrote that the British were not an artistic people, which honor goes to the French and the Italians. The real talent of the British said he was in literature. Well, when you see some of the things they built in Sri Lanka like these strange tea mountains, you get a nagging feeling whether they had a strong artistic streak as well.
For me the hill country represented an enormous, maybe the world's largest, impressionist work of art, long before the French thought they invented it. In the 19th century the British, replaced countless mountains of millions upon millions of trees not to mention animals, with perfectly trimmed tea bushes. It's weird when you think about it, they traveled thousands of miles in perilous seas, putting the locals to no end of trouble just to plant tea bushes? Of course, it was all for the money, but when you visit the hill country you get a strange feeling that there was an artistic motive as well.
And then I started seeing what some artists call “found objects” all over an ancient railway station. After the horrors of the First World War, artists, writers, and intellectuals thought deeply about it and formed an anti-war art movement called Dadaism. As one artist explained, “Dadaism wished to replace the logical nonsense of men of today with illogical nonsense.” The Dada movement led to the surrealist movement whose aim was to “free the unconscious to express itself.” If this seems odd it gets odder still when we view surrealist paintings. In “The persistence of Memory” by Salvador Dali withered clocks seem to be suffocating in a desert. The question that comes to any reasonable person's mind is “what in god’s name does it all mean.”
The upshot of all this was that when an Artist named Marcel Duchamp in 1917 purchased a standard urinal from a hardware shop, wrote R. Mutt in it, turned it sideways and displayed it on a pedestal, and called it “Fountain” it became one of the most recognizable artworks of the twentieth century. This particular kind of found object is called a “Ready-Made”. Soon artists started making all kinds of found objects. It seemed that if you took a clock and fixed a broomstick, it would become a great “found object”. And this railway station seemed to be full of such found objects. My attention was particularly drawn to a kind of ring (tablet) that was passed through the elbow of the engine driver when the train passed through the station. Surely this was a “found object”.
No comments:
Post a Comment