‘May be Removed at Will’ could have been a warm harmless
compilation of the chemical-process sepia-toned photographs that constituted
the series ’India Poems’. It could have been a displaying of Waswo Waswo X’s early journey. I
did not know Waswo when he came to India, started travelling, taking pictures,
falling in love; but the Waswo i know of today has been opening up notes on orientalism in a manner that i would love our contemporary
academics to. But getting into these questions of culture, power, gaze...has the capacity to take away our power to ‘remove
the intervening word/image’.
In these years of the 2000s (2000-2012), the art making and viewing
culture of contemporary art has changed a lot. Those were the early times of
the formation of ‘post colonial’ as an ideological practice, now heavy dose of
neoliberalism has made ideology (as a lived practice) unfashionable and yet in contemporary art, politics has become as canonical as form was
during modernism. This change is even
more dramatic in the context of photography...that has only recently forced the
door and arrived on the round table of contemporary art practices in India.
What struck me most was that formally these photographs (’India Poems’) was against-the-grain and formally far
different from what we know and acknowledge as the mainstream of documentary photography in India (Richard Bartholomew, Raghu Rai, Ram Rahman, Raghubir Singh, Jyoti Bhatt, Dayanita Singh)
Yes, these photographs were definitely not playing to the Cartier Bresson ‘style’
of the ‘western eye’ (both in the
context of documentary and photography), nor was it in the (then) new wave
coming in from the Royal College of Art London and New York.
The show has no catalogue, it comes
with a booklet, a beautifully written short story by Waswo, which not only
anchors the show and captures the changing history of the images. It also goes a long way in helping us to mock situate-(contextualise)
Waswo in the genre of the hundreds who comb the country called India, with
cameras around them...clicking its mundane exotica. For a person who has been
so sensitive about his location as an outsider...and has been increasingly made
conscious about his ‘orientalist’ gaze, this mock/strategic situating works as
a mode of subversion
against the gaze the artist is himself
subjected to. However, it also short story also helps us to understand Waswo’s self-consciousness
as a photographer/artist, his personalisation of the picturesque and his strange
falling in love with India.
The choice of sepia-tint
itself is telling...Waswo was showing ’India Poems’ in the dominant days of
black&white photography. The warm brown tints associated with sepia
photography give pictures a classic, old-fashioned feel, adding a sepia tone
to a black and white photograph softens the image, giving it a warm, nostalgic
feeling. This engagement with nostalgia
marks the undercurrent of Waswo’s engagement with art. For most photographers
the notion of analogue has been restricted to the medium, and the technical
mastery of it. Waswo is one of the very few for whom the analogue is a worldview,
precious and political. The love for the process, the journey, time and subjectivity
inform the semantics of analogue for him, and this transcends the mode of
printing and engulfs the manner in which the artist engages with the subject.
The show ‘May be Removed at Will’ takes this engagement
with the gaze and subject matter further and has to be seen in the backdrop of
his (exhibition and comic book) ‘Confessions
of an Evil Orientalist’. The automated presumptions that the visuals of the
India Poems series invoke have been skilfully inverted. We are no longer
looking longer looking at photographs, but at etched glass and sepia tinted framed
sculptures on the wall. This artistic strategy makes an intriguing and interactive exhibition. Words jupm at your eyes just before they pop in your brain...somehow preempting and stopping the pop...one takes a step back and comes closer again being drawn into the culture infused image text divide. Waswo forces us to update our encounter with the politics of orientalism, re understand the 'western gaze' and bring back the importance of authorship in art theory.
