When somebody is hailed as a celebrity and does not let go of decency and suavity, it generally bewilders me. The celebrities or the individuals catapulted to a star status usually have an inflated ego and a measure of unpredictability punctuates their overall demeanor. That makes them self-conscious and arrogant, thereby socially mal-adjusted. Recognition, pecuniary possessions and media attention get to their head.

The 5 feet 8 inches, ever smiling Rashid Rana is an exception. An excellent conversationalist with an uncanny sense of humour, Rashid betrays culture and a sense of style peculiar to him.

That, of course, is expected of “the world’s leading visual artists who has coined the term ‘EART’ to describe moments of self-expression beyond the arts: ways of thinking, being and acting creatively in real life”.

He has to have his own style. What drew me to him was his intensive engagement with ideas which serve as an integral premise of his artistic articulation. Rashid himself is succinct about the primacy of ideas in his artistic practice.

“Ideas take centre in my imagery and pictorial strategies; they dictate the medium and format to be employed,” he says. The ideas are what set humans free, therefore, he invests prodigiously in the thought process that ends up in the formation of an idea.

Once the formation of the idea is concretised, it assumes a physical shape. Along with the centrality of ideas, which he thinks are formed in locution, it is through words that ideas come to fruition. That formation of the nexus between the birth of an idea and its connection with words appears to suggest that he has picked these thoughts from Levi Strauss and to a certain extent from Derrida.

Rashid professes the redundancy of ‘structure,’ dismissing Strauss, and argues that it limits the scope of thought as well as its articulation. To me, this position is slightly problematic. Being an entity contained in the specificity of space and time, if a structure is dismantled, it will be followed by another structure. Humans, therefore, are bound to exist and operate in a ‘structure’. There is no escape from inevitability of structure primarily because of the spatio-temporal limitation of humans.

But Rashid explicitly refutes this argument through his work. Thus, he deals in ‘diametrically’ different modes, such as “painting, stainless steel sculpture, video installation, photo-sculpture and photo mosaic.” He does not balk at synergising with other art forms like architecture.

The most vivid illustration of such synergy is the Pakistan pavilion at the Dubai expo, which has made Rashid a household name among Pakistani literati. Inexhaustible creative potential makes Rashid receptive to multiple socio-cultural epistemic strands that conflate in a newer artistic episteme. That’s how his creative self goes on unravelling itself to the astonishment of many.

Rashid, like several of his peers, mentions his mentor Zahur ul Akhlaq (1941-1999) with a glint in his eye. During his student years at the National College of Arts (NCA), Akhlaq was a charismatic figure and very few could elude the brilliance he exuded. Needless to say, Akhlaq wielded considerable influence on the whole generation of young artists because of his “witty explorations of modernity and South Asian tradition that also informed Rashid’s “post-minimal sensibility”.

That influence remained quite tangible even when he went to the Massachusetts College of Arts (1991-1997). Adnan Madani maintains, “it seemed very likely at that time in the early 1990s that Rana was destined to take on a few aspects of Akhlaq’s practice (such as the interest in the grid as a pictorial device), and develop them along the lines of neo-conceptual painters like Bleckner and Halley, layering referential forms with ‘in’ jokes and slick stylistic acrobatics.”

That (outgrowing the influence of Akhlaq) speaks of Rashid as a maverick who never flinches in treading uncharted paths. Hence, he describes his art-practice as an “unburdening from self-imposed pressure of prescriptive and dogmatic ideas of affiliating one’s identity to political and cultural boundaries”. Therefore, in his artistic journey, he transcends the confines of any singular/ static form of identity, which for him, is in a permanent state of flux. He has the same idea about the peculiarity of a geographical locale or the specificity of a culture. That is how he broke away from the paradigmatic drawn out by Akhlaq and carved out his own locus as a star artist.

Initially, he had a deep interest in the duality of space (untitled series/grid paintings, from early 1990s) but switched to a wider phenomenon of paradoxes, contradictions, polarities and parallel realities (photo mosaics from 2002-2009). In a conversation with me, Rashid talked about these dualities and seemed uninhibitedly radical while talking about their effectiveness “as a tool for lessening the drama of presumed absolutes and negating them because they often draw attention to their own absurdity and hence the use of doubles, mirrors etc.”

As this conversation went on, I admired the profundity of his thought and the depth with which he drew out meanings and the lucid manner of his expressing these complex ideas. He has the ability of forging a link between the simple and the complex. He quite conveniently traverses both ways, from the complex to simple and vice versa.

To conclude this part of the write-up, let me shed some light on the multiple profiles that he simultaneously possesses. I have found a line written about him that describes him immaculately: He mediates between being an artist, curator, educator and visionary. I must add that Rashid is an asset to the community, the nation and much beyond it. I am immensely proud to be at the institution of which he too is a part.

The author is a professor of   history and a writer. He can be reached at tahir.kamran@bnu.edu.pk