The Radical Beak

Artist: Samij Datta
Title: The Radical Beak (2008)
Medium: Mixed Media on Paper

Description: The surreal image of the painting based on Charles Baudelaire’s poem The Albatross is almost theatrical as it invites a gaze into its complicated layers of visual linguistics by adopting a technique of using dark colours on the four corners shaped like curtains leaving the centre open on both sides like a tubular structure. This creative arrangement that draws us into the central theme of the painting resembles Daguerre’s theatre illusions in Paris. But it differs from Daguerre’s diorama in the sense that the theme remains unchanged but creates multiple revision of the effect of light and water on a ship “that slips through bitter gulfs”. The two dimensional yellow rectangle like a paper cut-out mast of the ship assembles the sea bird’s plumage, the eye and the beak which is shaped like the nib of a fountain pen. Folk style is adopted here to fit in themes of parody and irony. The “branding iron” in the bird’s beak becomes the nib of a pen further reinforcing the albatross/poet identification in the poem. The problem of art and aesthetics was largely settled since the advent of photography gave “us every desirable guarantee of exactitude” said Charles Baudelaire after his visit at the first photographic exhibition in Paris in 1859. Indeed, this was an ironical criticism by Baudelaire as he believed in an aesthetics based on lived experiences and not on preconceptions or philosophies. This anti-realist nature in him much accounts for a strangeness of modernity in a city poet who regarded the mimesis of nature as the real threat to art and life. Instead of a naturalist depiction of a scene with details based on the freeze frame shot of the poem where “someone teases” the bird’s beak “with a branding iron,/another mimics, limping, the crippled flyer!”, the painter uses what André Breton calls “pure psychic automatism” to attain his point de l'esprit or mental vantage-point after reading the poem “The Albatross”. The use of soft brush to create the wash-effect in blue and red gives the painting a dream quality where a constant evaporation and fading out of meanings takes place making the total painting somewhat unreadable from a visual perspective in the context of its inheritance from Baudelaire’s text. This Derridan “Differance” of the painting is what allows a visual space where the Baudelairean ship becomes a school-boy like paper boat floating on waters. The swirls of the brush strokes on the yellow rectangular mast-like structure closely resemble a pattern of ritual dancing in its angular motion of bends and curves. Albatrosses show this behaviour during mating season and this language is vital to attract and choose a matching partner. So, “the men of crew” by teasing the captive bird mimics their own process of procreation. This infertility is cast out by the poet himself who though isolated like the albatross, writes for it a poem that restores the mental procreation of ideas from a certain state of confined consciousness. As Lacan tells us that the “sliding of the signified beneath a signifier takes place” in dreams, here too the pen/beak adds into its metrics writings of other poets/lost souls of sailors who have seen and written on imprisonment of lives unfathomed by a sea of words. The inverted T-shaped structure of the boat signifies a cross upside down which attempts to define Baudelaire’s Christianity and his “theological innocence”
(T S Eliot in Selected Essays,1960). So the “Differance” lies in how this painting distances itself from the moral values learnt in Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, where the sin of killing the albatross is finally forgiven by redemption.




This belief in a system outside the body of the individual is what Baudelaire denounced when he said “there can be no progress (real, that is, moral) except in the individual and by the individual himself” (Mon Coeur Mis À Nu, 1897). The painting celebrates this inversion of values that Baudelaire radicalized with Mallarmé and Verlaine to form the so called Decadent Circle.

- Joy Roy Choudhury