When Talking Is High Art

British-German artist Tino Sehgal’s work ‘creates’ conversations between strangers in urban societies. Someone should tell him about Kolkata’s famous addas
Published in Open Magazine

2

BY Rahul Bhattacharya EMAIL AUTHOR(S)

Tagged Under | conversations | Tino Sehgal | urban society

Conversations

THE PERFORMANCE HAS NEVER BEEN SHOT Sehgal insists his works reside only in the space they occupy, and in memories

We have already pointed out the need of constructing situations as being one of the fundamental desires on which the next civilisation will be founded. This need for absolute creation has always been intimately associated with the need to play with architecture, time and space


—Formulary for a New Urbanism, Gilles Ivain [Ivan Chtcheglov] October 1953, printed in Internationale Situationniste #1
+++
One of the earliest critiques of urban societies is that it renders human interactions difficult, creating a sense of alienation that doesn’t stops haunting city dwellers. This constant feeling of alienation and the need to alienate, which defined early concerns with urbanism, is what the above quote from the Situationist International website responds to, calling for an intervention through ‘performed situations’. This seems especially pertinent in developing countries, which are witnessing massive refurbishment and redevelopment of cities, leading to a speeding up of urban life.
The notion of creating a situation has, in many aspects, fundamentally changed the notion of performance and how the viewing public interacts with it. Tino Sehgal consciously decides to carry this notion of performance into the visual arts with This Situation, an acclaimed piece that travelled to India in collaboration with the Goethe Institute last week.
One Sunday evening, walking into the Experimenter Gallery in Kolkata, visitors were confronted by a group of six people in everyday wear, deep in discussion on philosophical issues. Whenever the performers noticed a new visitor stepping in, they would stop the discussion to greet her with, “Welcome to this situation!” The players subsequently changed  their positions with movements frozen in slow motion, and one of them would then open a quote with slow movements (often evoking the poise of classical sculptures) and quote a hypothesis from the intellectual history of Euro-America without naming the author. The quotes were varied, invoking economics, art, ethics and technology. However, it soon became clear that the choice of quotes and contexts showed an affiliation with liberalist resistance to the ethics of late capitalism.
At about 7 pm that evening, a middle-aged woman walked into Experimenter Gallery and was momentarily stunned when the performers broke off their conversation, inhaled deeply, and sprang a collective “Welcome to this situation!” greeting at her. She stood for a while and soon found her place among a small group seated on the floor. Initially, she avoided eye contact, and it took her time to understand what was going on. Soon, seeing the audience participate in the discussion, she realised that it was a conversation she could join too. One could see that she was straining to understand the current discussion around the importance that economics should have in our lives. Eventually, she chose not to participate, and when she noticed that people were actually allowed to get up and leave when they so wanted, it visibly made her feel more comfortable. In a while, she left.
As a performative mode, some silent members of the audience were even asked: “What do you think?” On the other hand, other members of the audience stepped up and freely participated in the discussions. Eventually, over the course of two evenings, one could see a continuation of the thoughts and concerns that the performers and audience kept coming back to.
This Situation is conceived as a collapsible travelling structure, performed only by people trained or authorised by Sehgal. During the Goethe Institute tour, at each stop, three or four local players performed with a two-member German team under the direction of Sehgal’s close associate, Louise Höjer. Like all interpreters of Tino Sehgal’s works, they were selected carefully, and were required to rehearse at local Goethe Institutes.
Speaking to the performers after the first evening, one got to know the structure of the performed situation, of the two-day training workshop that preceded the enactment, the nature of the quotes used and the trained slow motion as a mode of ‘performitivity’. One also learnt that this is a copyrighted model and the same set of quotes are repeated globally.
There did descend a sense of discomfort with the assumption on the part of the artist about the universal applicability of the model and quotes used. One had also hoped that the artist would have travelled with the performance himself to listen to various concerns raised at new locations. This lack of willingness to listen is characteristic of the European understanding of the modular.
Sehgal’s stance against the excessive materiality of the high-art culture leads to material embodiments of art—catalogues, photographs, films—being wholly absent in his work, even at the secondary level. While this emerges as a grand resistance, it also takes away the possibility of understanding the relational aesthetics between the public spheres in which this is performed, making it harder still to listen to differences.
This work travelled from Mumbai, through Bangalore to Kolkata and by the time this is published, a performance would have already happened in Delhi. Searching online for reactions to this work, one came across largely European and American awe of this Situationist transgression into an art gallery, and the possibility of collective thought and a civilised exchange of ideas between and among strangers.
Among the Indian cities where This Situation has travelled, Kolkata has been the most resistant to the new wave of urbanism sweeping the country. Maybe it is one of the few remaining cities which has not (yet) confronted an absolute disappearance of civilised conversation between strangers. In fact, the adda is almost as famous as This Situation as a module (though it is not copyrighted). The city is also familiar with interventions in the performer-audience relationship in the works of the late theatre personality Badal Sarkar.
Perhaps that is why instead of awe and fascination, the city greeted This Situation with a welcome familiarity and mild amusement.

Notes on the ‘Famine Series’ paintings by Ramkinker Baij

Published in The Art&Deal Magazine as cover story for Art and Society

I encountered this painting during the Museum Collection exhibition at the Art Konsult Gallery. A little known work hardly documented and never really discussed as a Ramkinker Baij masterpiece.  There is an universal ambiguity regarding the title of the work because around the time ( 1970’s) it was not fashionable in Indian art to leave major work “untitled “ as a title. An initial inquiry suggested that this work belong to the famine series and was attributed to 1973. This naming and dating created a zone of confusion for me as I was unable to locate a series called famine in Ramkinker’s oeuvre .If at all one can identify famine series within Ramkinkar’s body of work it would be a series of water color done in the 1940’s. there is almost no evidence of him having done significant oil on canvas work around that time. The famine in the painting itself seemed to be limited to the figure of old skeletal man with a begging bowl and the child whereas all other figures especially one of the lady carrying bowl in hand seemed extremely healthy and instead of the classical famine iconography of dying animals we see two healthy cows ploughing the field in the background.

The painting belongs to the renowned collector Dr. Mahesh Chandra and discussions with him reveal that there was an allusion to the artist’s mother in this work. This info led me to a psycho-analytical reading of the work drawing reference from a few painting s of Ramkinker Baij which depict child on a mother’s lap. However here the mother is young and the child is uncared for, old and starving. It made me think that the mother in the painting could possibly be ‘mother India’. The woman seems to be looking elsewhere, as if in a rush. Eyes firmly fixed towards the far away horizon. Was it a reference to Mother India’s neglect for its poor?  An early critique of how the nation was more interested in the rich getting its resources at the cost of the poor?  Though Ramkinker had very well known and well laid out socialist ideology this reading seems a little far fetched.  Then it also seemed quite plausible when one looked at the landscape in background where the trees almost mimic factories. Ramkinker brings back his early experiments with cubism to hint at a ghost industrial landscape. This rendering of the landscape led me to believe for a while that indeed this painting could be a subaltern critique of the nation as a mother. This reading also gained prominence in me as clearly there was no famine in Bengal in 1970’s.

However, from my knowledge of Ramkinker’s biography there was no reason to assume that he had that kind of a psycho-traumatic relation with his mother or the country and it was still not making sense to me. It is at this point that I called up Mr. Pranabranjan Roy, one of the most important knowledge archive about post-independence modernism in Bengal. In my conversation with Pranab da I learned that Ramkinkar had personally narrated this story behind this painting to him, and it was actually a reference to an incident that he heard from his mother in form of a story. When Ramkinkar was very young and his father would be working in fields, his mother would carry food for him every afternoon. On one mundane summer afternoon while going to the field his mother encountered an old starving man and he was begging her to give some food. His mother thinking that the food was meant for the artist’s father in her moment of duty ignored the old man and went to feed her husband lunch. While returning back, the dutiful wife saw that the old man had died. This story never stopped haunting the artist and a few years before he died he painted it on canvas. This story which Ramkinkar narrated to Pranabranjan Roy for a moment seems to be end of a journey which the painting took me through. It’s been a few days since that conversation and all my earlier observations came back to my mind, not as ex observation which have been negated or proved wrong in light of new Knowledge but as my observations which I was seeing in a new light. There are no wrong or right interpretations of a painting. This painting being located in a particular story does not take away the fact that a rural landscape has been rendered in the manner of an industrial one. It does not negate the fact that the resource are going to the people who have at the cost of have-nots. It does not negate the fact that it’s a story of a mother momentarily for getting whom she should taking care of. However there is a detailing that one cannot ignore. Even with a faraway look, her eyes fixed to horizon, and in a rush the “mother” is still aghast. Her face is wide open and her dilemma is still captured.

It was quite interesting to first hear of and then physically see that the ‘canvas’ is actually three canvasses stitched together. It took me by complete surprise and at a point even led to question the dating of the canvas. In the 70’s RK was quite well known, old and respected, he had retired as a professor/ head of dept. from Shantiniketan. Though falling ill he was doing large public commissions. Surely he was not poor to procure a canvass of his desired size.  Then my conversation with PR revealed that the dating of 70 authentic.  It was at that appointed that it dawned to me that I might be using the contemporary notions of art as a commodity on this work of art by Ramkinker. May be this is not important. May be it was more important to think of not wasting any canvas. Shantiniketan artists of his time were known to create masterpieces on scrape piece of paper and just throw them or give them away. An instinct which we may never understand because we come from a society that if a particular art piece is not recognized  in Capital terms then it almost loses’ its reason to exist.

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Tuesday, 31 May 2011 at 16:07

Conversation with KP Reji

  Taste sellers

For mattersofart -artist of the month 2007 september.

R.B- In your works there seems to be a certain coming back to the idiom of the narrative. It is not like the 80’s narrative where the ‘meaning’ seeks to be located in the intentionality of the artist.  This time, the artist seems to be stepping back and hinting at the narrative possibilities through a play with images. Giving a greater space for the audience to enter and interpret.

K.P.R- My challenge is there, painting has a history over thousand years old, and many artists have explored so many possibilities. Am trying to do something different there and find a space there…that is the challenge. One sees so many paintings, you have known the histories and yet you have to find something. At the end isms are a small matter, the process of painting will carry on, and it is through all this we will find our way.  Consciously or unconsciously ones works will have a connection with ‘this or that’, but there are possibilities within ‘this or that’.

R.B- And you are constantly trying to achieve that.

K.P.R- Yes , and when you are in need you will get it, because you are trying for it. There is no doubt about it.  

R.B- there is a refreshing simpleness about your works. It is not that the complexities are not there; it is about you digesting the complexities.

K.P.R- It is not about making it simple, it is about not making it complicated. You can enter it easily, that is the structure, and maybe it comes from the subjects I paint. The idea is not to make it complicated and yet keep the taste in it.  

R.B- your works have a very specific cultural and local inspirations background, do you think their values are consumable to people who are not exposed to these cultural specificities?

K.P.R- I think the more local it is the more global it becomes. There are things we can share with anyone, otherwise I cant enjoy Iranian movies or I cant enjoy Tarkovsky, but you see one can enjoy expressions across cultures, I can enjoy anyone like say Chaplin. Even the kids…they will atleast be laughing seeing his movies.

R.B- For you it seems that a successful painting is that can touch human sensibilities across cultures.

K.P.R- Of course, it is in one sense, it is in all sense, and a painting is really enjoyable if it can touch a basic human cord. It is important to keep the core of your expression and remember that you cannot please everyone.

R.B- When you make a statement like touching a ‘human cord’, it would be nice if you can experiment with modes of showing your works, making them more accessible.

K.P.R- I would really like to show my works in more places and in different kinds of spaces, but my mode of working is very slow. I am always in doubt…whether certain elements or colours are really helping the painting or not, and then I will be keeping my works for a long time and I will be changing things all the time, until they seem appealing to me. There is no way to know between the four colour which particular one is disturbing…it is a long process. I keep seeing a lot of paintings, and they will sometimes inform me that certain colours are not working in my painting…and through all this basically I am not producing much work.

R.B- I am not talking about gallery shows here.

K.P.R- Any show, like this solo, I had a commitment for the last three years, finally I thought I should do it. Mainly I spend a lot of time filtering things out, that’s what I feel.

R.B- You have a ‘solo show’ coming after a long time, is there a certain concentration efforts towards it.

K.P.R- I don’t look at a ‘solo show’ as a project, which has to be executed, it is more like ten ideas, which are finalized and shown. And it is not that I think because it is a ‘solo show’, elements of each work have to mix, but also in the process of reading my works for this show, I am avoiding some works.

But then there are certain things, recently I was invited to a camp in Kerela, it was a nice opportunity to travel in that region and also to go home, but I had to say no, I have a ‘solo show’ and it is a commitment. I will not say I denied the invitation, instead I think I missed an opportunity. In my mode of working a ‘solo show’ is a big thing, it takes a lot of time…maybe I will be spending a lot of time sitting in front of a painting, at the end there is not much work I am producing. 

 just above

R.B- Do you have any regrets for that?

K.P.R- Yes there is a bit of regret, it means fewer people get to see my works…it is only in one or two galleries, and it all ends in a catalogue, they are not traveling much. And it is not only about me, some of the really good artists are often only exhibiting abroad and you get to see only the photographs in catalogues.  Some Indian contemporary artists like Atul Dodiya you will really like to see original works. Galleries have to be a little more thoughtful about spreading works.

I want to show my works in Kerela, Baroda, and many places.

R.B. – Will you be doing a preview in Baroda.

K.P.R- As you can see my studio space is too less, so I tend to send my works across after they are finished. There are three works you can see, two I am still working on and the other I kept it just because you were coming down for the interview, and I thought atleast one finished work should be there.

Then now it is the rainy season, and I don’t want my works to catch fungus, these are artist’s problems you see. I would definitely like to show my works in Baroda before taking them to Bombay, but I cannot do it.

R.B- When one see your works over a period of time, say the last eight years or so, are you happy with the changes and continuity that mark the trajectory of your works?

K.P.R- Yes I am happy with the changes, and as for the continuity you said, when you see continuity and there is continuity, and if there is continuity, it will continue.

R.B- Do you ever feel the anxiety of stagnation?

K.P.R- No, I don’t think I will stagnate, as long as I have the process of finding new challenges and analyzing things and how they are happening.

Of course, sometimes when you are working there is a doubt about a particular painting, you will start with full hope and then you feel that this image is not working…and things like that…you stop there.

R.B- Are their any paintings of your that you don’t like?

K.P.R- It is not the paintings that I do not like, sometimes I am not happy with my painting if I had the capacity to paint it better…that kind of feelings I have sometimes.

Like the ‘Taste Seller’ and the ‘Merchant of Four Seasons’, now I am repeating them…‘Merchant of Four Seasons’ I thought was a good painting when I first did it, now I see it could have been much better, so I am doing it again

R.B- there is a certain kind of class representation one sees in your works, a lot of it is about the life and moments of the lower middle class, is there a ideological consciousness about this.

K.P.R-I have always painted people like this…right from my student days. Initially I was not conscious about it, but I heard it from many people. Then later I saw it and recognized it. I have always painted thing that are close to me and around me.

R.B- You mean thing that you can relate to…

K.P.R- No, it is not about relating to things, it is painting the things that you know and are sure about.

The salt seller that you see in that painting, the idea came when I was staying in Nizampura, one guy will come with the salt like this, the thing about him is that there is no money involved in the transaction. These people used to carry a weighing scale, and they will measure salt with the things the consumer is giving. If you want salt then you give him things like plastic bartans, he measures salt using the things you give as weight.

Then it struck me that that he is a taste seller…namak is taste, and then with that there is an entire history of salt and the barter system…especially in India. …and is through all this the painting came.

I don’t know how much of all this, the painting is communicating, but I am trying.

R.B- One final question, it has become a near mandatory final question to a painter featured in mattersofart as the ‘artist of the month’. Is mediatic realism dead?

K.P.R- It is not dead. No form of expression actually dies…if things happened like that painting itself would be dead centuries ago.  It is more got to what you can do with it and how you can use a language to say new things. Many artists use mediatic realism to follow a trend or to hide their skills, but then someone like T.V Santosh uses the same language to make very powerful commentaries. One should really know what to do with an image.  

Don't cry for me yet

fighting with the army
false chirstmas presents
unanswered letters
promises forgotten
living with no strength
betrayed at the weakest moments
Jinni and all such memories
drunk dialing made me fall sick
disappeared..but still have left a trace
don't cry for me yet

Return of Chittaprosad and printmaking in Contemporary Indian Art

.

..Chittaprosad I Kayyur Martyrs I Subbarayan, a police constable, who participated in police beating at Kayyur fell into the hands of protesters on the very next day. People were enthusiastic to handle him. But leaders discouraged them. The police man was asked to lead the protest march holding the flag. He did it since there was no other go, when he got a chance he jumped into the river and tried to escape. But he got drowned in the river. Then peasant movement and Congress were strong in Kayyur and suburbs. Police and vested interests took Kayyur incident as an opportunity to suppress revolutionary movement. They charged a case against 61 people in Kayyur and around. Of them the court decided five to be hanged into death

40th issue editorial for Art&Deal Magazine 

by Rahul Bhattacharya (Notes) on Monday, 8 August 2011 at 13:31

I don’t know what kind of a difference the Chittaprosad show will make to the art viewing public of Delhi. Of course everyone who has seen the show has fallen in love with it and the show has played a very important role in bringing back the memory of Chittaprosad and the political zeal of his practice. It is at this point of ‘politics’ that the mind wonders as to how does being an appreciator of Chittaprosad and being an industrialist causing famine in tribal areas go hand in hand? It is almost tempting to declare this as being scandalous… labeling it as some kind of dangerous schizophrenia. But when insanity rules it is the sane who become mad.

Strangely enough there could have been a different entry. A hardcore leftist activist was just one part of his personality that affected his aesthetics; Chittaprosad also loved beautiful flowers, folktales and many such mundanities. He had his own aesthetic tensions between Stalinist art, European modernism and Indian folk. Actually the greatness of Chittaprosad lies in precisely these multiple points of entries. Thus, it was quite amusing to watch the leftist politics of Chittaprosad being highlighted in a show organized and showcased for an audience who practice exactly opposite to what he preached.

    Before I move on I need to drop in and say that the five volume book edited by Sanjoy Malik if exemplary and for the first time provides us with a rare art historical insight on Chittaprosad, and bringing back a lot of faith in art historic scholarship.  

    As the mind further wo/andered as to why/were his political art was splashed in a gallery’s PR notes and press reviews and not his sublime water color, still life, flowers or the Ramayana series! Maybe this is a betrayal of the continuing inability of art history writing to engage with aesthetics and be more comfortable talking about the content value of an art work. The value of art is but a coming together of object/lessness and how that is represented. There is a growing negligence in talking about modes of representation (simply putting a flower can be depicted in hundreds of different ways).

    This started when art history revolted against the over bearing rule of stylistic analysis. It’s slowly dawning to some of us that maybe the baby has been thrown out with bath water. In this period developments in the world of Theory also ensure that the very terms like ‘artist’, ‘style’, ‘mark making’ had all become almost too layered to be able to negotiated through but the factor which contributed the most was (possibly) the exponential investors boom in contemporary art and how in our hurry to seduce this market, we (art writers, gallerist, curators, artists) reduced art only to the level of the surface neglecting the complicated questions of artistic process.

    Parallel to the Chittaprosad show, in the warehouse of the 3rd Pasta lane in the Abhay Maskara gallery, a six week open door printmaking residency of T Venkanna began. This residency has recent parallels in the Religare Art residency and the long running practices of KHOJ. What makes the T N Venkanna residency at 3rd Pasta lane special is its focus on printmaking in a gallery space which is acknowledged to be ‘cutting-edge and experimental’. Traditional graphic art (the kind that Chittaprosad used) has been dismissed as obsolete and redundant. Again the great period of investors’ boom and its fixation on canvasses combined with its inability to understand the concept of editions spelt the doom. Also clearly there was less money to be made by selling prints then by selling canvasses. Maybe printmaking is the only medium that was first declared dead by the galleries and the latent interest got snuffed out over a period of time.

    A five volume book will never be published about it, but the real journey of contemporary print making in the years of 2000- 2010 has been that of extremely talented print makers converting to be extremely mediocre painters, and the system actually encouraging it.

Ina Kaur I Reclaiming Identities I Etching

 Thankfully there seems to be a turn around. In the last couple of years artists like Chandramohan, T N Venkanna, Preeti Sood, Ina Kaur have successfully managed to present print making as a vibrant contemporary art form and one day we will be very thankful to studios like Chap in Baroda, Garhi in Delhi and of course the Bharat Kala Bhavan in Bhopal to keeping the practice alive in a hard unforgiving decade.  

    How we have faith in art as a practice, and how that reflects on our engagements with art as a product will have a deep impact on how art develops. One important lesson to learn is that the market is but a part of the society.

untitled

kill me for a penny...kill me for a dime
am singing the redemption song out of tune
still yearning for the joy of being a fool

No place to die

hul Bhattacharya on Tuesday, 26 July 2011 at 17:07

Is it ok to be?
Even though its' only me
I am nothing but am
Doing only the things that i can
Just as i used to before
I don't know things at all
Thats why i fly when i fall
Could I do this to me
Now you can just let me be
No one said anything at all
It was raining and still it was dull
Maybe means nothing at all
I can now still be a child
Can fly no need to hide
But I am nothing but am
Doing only things that I can
May even fall when i fly
This is no place to die

is it hard to be a man?

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Wednesday, 29 December 2010 at 03:05

never went so far that i could not see
maybe stayed too close to let you be

does one ever know when the time does come
does the applause mean the the part is done?

'thud'..its that sound that's breaking my heart
in your pain in know i have my part

lips so warm and soft and the arms i call home
tiny hands for the junkies soul the gods had sent, or so i was told

the meaning of you and the meaning of me
did i stay close enough, or did i not let you be

the morning, the dawn and the dusk

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Monday, 21 June 2010 at 14:31

there is no morning without a morning
no dawn before dawn
there is no joy without living
and no tune without a song


sometimes it is yesterday
maybe even tomorrow
but when lips are smiling
they wash away all my sorrows


there is no morning without birdies
no dusk without sunshine going home
there is no joy without living
even if the sky is my huge blue dome

more than words can say?

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Saturday, 26 June 2010 at 06:26

udhti udhti ek paanchi aayi
choti si thi nanni si thi
sabh chodke..udti udti woh sirf mere ghar ko aayi

bohut khele bohut naache
phir meine toka..phir uusne toki
phir uusne toki..phir meine toka
usne toki mei ne toka
aur ek din naraz hoke woh chali gayi


mei akele khidki pe behetha
socha..aacha hua who chali gayi
ghar gaanda..haar kone pe daana
paayri thi..paar aacha hua woh chali gayi

saaf ghar aur dookh bhara dil
dheere dhrere mujhe khata gaya
khata gaya khata gaya..aur mere dil ko rulata gaya
dur kahi who paanchi dikha
jaane bina honto mei muskan aaya

udhti udhti ek paanchi aayi
choti si thi nanni si thi
udthi udthi udthi woh ghar ko aayi


botul khele bohut naache
khuub khaye khuub ghoome
london ja ke rani ko bhi dekhe
yea kare woh kare
uudh jayi phir waapas aayi

aandar se daari hui thi
phir tokunga
saapna todunga


haar ghaar pe paanchi nahi aati hai
har dil ko itna khushi nahi milta hai
nahi tokunga kaabhi uuse
choti si hai...nanni si hai
khuda ne mere paas bheja tha uuse
mere zindagi saajane ke liye
bus..itni si hi baat hai

5 hrs past midnight

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Thursday, 01 July 2010 at 04:58

dont want them to think any thing
this is jsut a hoax for them
when they see just this
they will have no idea of the theme

you always have known that i love to fuck you
want you to know that i love you more

you have always known that i love to eat you
want you to know that i love you more
you have always known that i love to be fed by you
want you to know that i love you more
you know that i love it when you like the worst of my poetry
want you to know i love you more
as you sleep tight..and as your love makes me happy and sleepy
i know that that i might love all your habits
but i will always love you more

boo rain

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Monday, 05 July 2010 at 23:21

rain
rain
rain
rain
rain
to my water nymph..fro the net somewhere
Stand in the rain
Whisper in the rain
Cry in the rain
Dance in the rain
Sing in the rain
Scream in the rain
Live in the rain