by Jerry Cullum, Ph.D.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, in one of his anthropological cautionary tales, sets forth the seemingly incomprehensible behavior of a clan whose language is unknown to the anthropologist observing them. Proposing several mutually exclusive possible interpretations of their actions, Wittgenstein finally asks, "Have we any way of choosing among these alternatives?"

In another instance, discussing the seemingly illogical basis for a deeply held religious belief, he comments, "For a blunder, that's too big." And adds, a little later, that if he heard an otherwise commonsensical person engage in such a curious assertion, he would think to himself, "This is no blunder."

These reflections make appropriate starting points for pondering the artistic career of A. G. Goréja. For it is unquestionably the case that Goréja, who has produced landscape art in a reasonably creditable version of romantic realism, including some visionary scenes that are quite striking by any standards, has also engaged in whimsical-looking styles that are likely to appear quite strange to art-historically savvy inheritors of European culture.

We are accustomed to the contorted cartoon character as a vehicle of nihilism or idiosyncrasy (à la R. Crumb) in pop genres, and as a high-art vehicle in the paintings of Peter Saul or Kenny Schraf in the world of the Whitney Biennial - not to mention Ronnie Cutrone and Rodney Alan Greenblat, whose emergence onto the national scene in exactly contemporaries with the period of Goréja's most cartoon-like style. Therefore, we do not expect to find such a style used as a vehicle for esoteric religion, as Goréja has used it. Postmodernist appropriation of popular styles is typically ironic; so-called postcolonial art is typically political. We do not know what to make of art that seems to resemble both kinds of "post" and be neither one.

But theorist - from Thomas McEvilley in art criticism to Kwame Anthony Appriah in philosophy or James Clifford in anthropology - should have sensitized us to the possibility that when we are taken aback by styles and messages that seem anomalous, we are witnessing an inventive collision of forms of culture. For although A. G. Goréja has long been resident of the United States, his sensibilities were first formed in British India, and subsequently in Europe were he lived and studied art in several cities. He abandoned art for a decade in the 1970s and '80s to devote himself to Sufism - but Sufism as acquired from study of scholars and ancient texts rather than apprenticeship to a Master in the traditional sense. We are, then, already in a post modern as well as postcolonial world - even though Goréja would regard both terms as fundamentally inapplicable to his art. So the rules of twentieth century art history cannot be used with impunity to understand this man's career.

This does not mean that we cannot make serious aesthetic judgments regarding the relative adequacy of the symbols Goréja has chosen to communicate his vision as they operate in an American context, or that we must surrender the possibility of deciding the extent to which his work either transmits a tradition or creates an integral vision that is of interest to our contemporary situation. It does mean that we must, at least for a time, suspend judgment in order to study a cross-cultural exploration that is, in every way, quite alien to our emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic sensibilities, inasmuch as it seems to be (but surely is not) a paradoxical echo of the least esteemed portions of American culture. It says much about modes of cultural misunderstanding that some of Goréja's most metaphysically serious paintings elicit a pained giggle from viewers who grew up with a certain styles of postwar American comic books.

It is interesting to note that Goréja's most recent style resembles a marriage between Europe's biomorphic Surrealism and Islam's tradition of creating fluid, abstracted figuration from the texts of the Koran - whether or not these resemblances are intentional.

There is every reason to suppose that they are not. Pakistan, where Goréja lived for some years during his childhood, of course, is an Islamic country but not an Arab one; it's aesthetic stems in large part from the marriage of Islamic and Indian aesthetics carried out under the Mogul emperors. But Goréja didn't acquire his primary aesthetic in Pakistan; he acquired it through residency and study in London, Vienna, and Paris, and assorted other European cities, at a moment in postwar history when the full implications of the decolonization of British India had yet to be experienced. Goréja is scarcely an artist of the postcolonial moment, even though the thirty years in which he has created art are also the prime years of postwar decolonization.

But he clearly is not a Western artist either. The utter lack of what postwar Europe would have called existential anxiety, the peculiar focus upon brilliant colors as symbols of a vivacious joy deeper than historical tragedy, the placid metaphysical transmutation of what Europe would regard a psychoanalytic territory - all bespeak a culture utterly other than the European ones in which he gained his inspiration. Even if he titles one piece "Danté Marries Beatrice in His Dream," we are scarcely in the thought-world of Danté's Italy - even if Goréja's is closer to Danté than he is to Freud or Adorno, and even if Danté got his metaphysical model from mystical Islam rather than from Aquinas.

Indeed, in Goréja's sunny repetitive imagery, even greed and human evil appear in rather benign guises, as grasping hands reach after the forbidden apple of Paradise. Faced with this indefatigable good-naturedness, jaded critics are all too likely to speak of Goréja in terms Edenic of innocence.

This would of course, be quite wrong, even if it didn't land the critic in the currently dreaded sin of some illusory, exotizing "Orientalism." Goréja has experienced many things in this singularly corrupted world of ours, and if his works exude such an alien air of optimism, there is more at work here that the Forrest Gump syndrome. The Romantics taught us something about regaining Paradise by coming in through the back door after going all around the world (or about eating once more of the Tree of Knowledge in order to regain our innocence); and there are figures aplenty, from the Malamatic of Islamic cultures tot eh Holy Fools of Eastern Orthodoxy, who lead us to believe that apparent innocence is not always a sign of the failure to learn from experience.

Regardless of our final opinion in such matter - insofar as we are qualified to have any - it is clear that Goréja intends his cross-cultural aesthetic to be the vehicle for messages based upon mystical wisdom tradition. We owe him the common courtesy of investigating his interpretation, taking, perhaps, as one of our touchstones the Sufi observation that one should speak of the unknown in terms of what is called "known" by the receiver of the information.

Yet if we do so, we find ourselves enmeshed in several conundrums simultaneously. What exactly are we looking at when we look at these various canvases? At allegorically paintings in the European tradition? At objects that are essentially part of the long Sufi teaching tradition? At idiosyncratic works that are at once both and neither? What is the appropriate relationship, in this case, between the artist's self-understanding and the physicality of the work of art? Can we be sure that we have understood the artist's self-understanding even after he told us about it? If a work does not speak to our "heart" or to our head, can it speak to some other interior sense?

If the paintings are more European-derived than anything else, then we possess an appropriate set of critical responses, conditioned by the twists and turns of the aesthetic dimension of European visuality. If, on the other hand, these works are taken as primarily teaching-stories or design in the sense derived from various Sufi traditions, European aesthetics, or indeed aesthetics in general, is an inappropriate tool for dealing with them: indeed, in this case they are not art objects at all, and their appearance in the gallery system may be taken as simple another teaching device. If, however, they have a Sufic dimension that is appropriate to one realm, but they are being straightforwardly presented in another realm, under the conditions prescribed by that realm - then we have the peculiar difficulty of judging things that were created from one set of motivations and inner demands but are being presented on a playing field that derives from quite different motivations and inner demands. As in the Wittgenstein story to which I alluded at the beginning of this essay, have we any way of choosing among the alternative judgments? If we do not have such a way, how can we being to say anything at all?"

Jerry Cullum is associate editor of Art Papers and hold an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Emory University. As a free-lance critic, he writes for various art journals and newspapers throughout the United States.