Public Art interventions by Helmut Dick

Since early April this year, KHOJ has seen an outburst of programming around public art, elements of which were visible during the performance art residency organised by it in August. The Dilli Dur Ast camp, the video workshop by Sophie Ernst as also the associate residency of Saina Anand all were run in parallel, creating the ground for the KHOJ Public Art residency. The residency, which began on August 18, brought together five artists from Amsterdam, Jakarta, Bangalore, Lahore, and yet another who revels in working between two locations Mumbai and Bastar. Helmut Dick, Jasmeen Patheja, Ali Talpur and Navjot Altaf were accompanied by Takahiro Noguchi, the sharp-minded critic in residence and a Fulbright scholar researching public/community art in India. As one began to critically engage with this sudden flux taking place in the fibre of the cities artistic practice, it became clear that as critics, curators and art lovers, we (as yet) don't know the language and the strategies with we can engage with public art. Public art is still understood in terms of high art and hence dichotomies like artist vs. citizen still exist. However, one thing is clear, the most effective of public art practitioners are those who have learned to forget the anxiety of art and non-art, and yet retain deep aesthetic sensibilities in their public interventions.

The KHOJ project sought to encourage new genre art, involving an exploration of new media. The residency was aimed at inculcating an awareness of public art that seeks to intervene into urban or community visual-scapes. Alternatively using media and technology, public artists revel in working outside the gallery and the studio, often choosing to produce work in dialogue with the public. Sometimes referred to as community art, such art blurs the lines between art and life, often by incorporating elements of performance art or public participation. Of course, there still remain a lot of theoretical problems to be engaged with and one still strives to be able to define the new genre in public art, which is only now becoming visible in India. There have been some scattered but bold interventions; some camps are being organised, workshops are taking off and there is also a bit of funding in place for a few new genre public artists.

New genre public art, as an art form, typically focuses on community building and sometimes is regarded as an instrument for change. There is usually some issue that becomes part of it, and public art is increasingly being understood as being about thinking with people around you to feel more connected to the world. New genre public art uses both traditional and non-traditional media to communicate and interact with a broad and diversified audience about issues directly relevant to their lives, basing itself on dialogue. The attempt is to be able to develop art designed for life outside the gallery, art that emphasises a process of engagement with the public. Like in England in the 50s, strands of influence are seeping in and networks are being formed, all leading to a new radical urban youth culture that is as yet in its nascent stage in India.

The engagement with Helmut Dick's works is an attempt to engage with and document an important intervention, an intervention into the cities understanding of artistic practice. Helmut Dick uses quirky and often outrageous public installations through which he plays with the humour of the urban citizen. He delights in making you confront the unexpected. His works are located more in the process of execution and how the visual finally shapes up is but a part of it.

Helmut Dick organised a series of installations, which were shown on three different crowded squares in Delhi. These were roving public installations/performances that were periodically unloaded, arranged in various places, picked up and moved on. Helmut Dick's bold and inventive approach resulted in works that evoked strong emotional reactions from the viewers. Still, the red line in his works was their sharp humour and absurdity, which made them multi-dimensional and interesting to approach. Helmut's site-specific works were based on careful research of the physical/social aspects of the site, in an attempt to forge strong connections and interactions between the work and its surroundings.

2006, Rahul Bhattacharya�

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rahul bhattacharya

Joint Secretary
Performers Independent
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let the river flow

Four Case Studies – Direction for Art and Practice in contemporary India

Second Part of this 3 part Upload.The first part can be viewed on - http://noplacetodie.blogspot.in/2012/02/four-case-studies-direction-for-art-and.html#!http://noplacetodie.blogspot.com/2012/02/four-case-studies-direction-for-art-and.html

The aesthetic point of view :

When visiting art galleries and talking to a few industry drivers, gallerists and directors of art spaces, they were all talking about one thing: now that the market is perceived to be down, they want to discover new talents and work with young artists. This is as much an delusion as the notion that older and more established artists are no longer active, involved and thus have no more value. Like anywhere else, people are obsessed with young and emerging artists, yet the difference is that the Indian art structure hasn’t diversified to have the intellectual and theoretical capacity to address and take advantage of the ongoing practice of more established artists and their artistic relevance.

(Maybe) this is because, art criticism and critical engagement with artworks is almost non-existent in India. Art criticism doesn’t exist as a course in art academies. Much of the writing and catalogues produced concerning contemporary art in the past decade were works commissioned by galleries or individual artists to give credit to their artists and practice. It’s hard for most to understand and acknowledge the importance and value of independent criticism and unbiased opinions. 
Led by Geeta Kapur, Rummana Hussain, Nalini Malani, Bhupen Khakhar, Vivan Sundarm a few artists and art critics in began envisage a distinctive position in international contemporary art. When one reads Geeta Kapur’s seminal text for the six artist show Place for People  (Jehangir Art Gallery, Bombay and Rabindra Bhavan, New Delhi, 1981 ), one witnesses a claim for a post colonial avante garde to be based on thematic figuration. She succeeded in syncing us with the David Hockney lead post Greenbergian shifts in the Euro American  art world. Armed with the power of post-colonial thought, new art and art history began questioning of the  western modernist ideas such as formalism (which ruled Indian art academies), but with it brushed aside many various other artistic impulses.  

At the same time, art history in India itself was being taken over by of cultural studies. This contact supposed that a painting or a sculpture was begun to be looked at more as a carrier of signs and not as an aesthetic domain. Such impact from cultural studies meant that meaning conveyed through pictures and the ethics of that meaning got more value than the construction of the image itself. The word ethics itself was understood in a politically correct neo liberalist way which foregrounds liberalist political correctness.

With the onset of the international market, capital and know-how India as a whole has embarked on the journey and process of gradually placing issues brought from Indian context into the larger cultural background of the world, in a lively and creative way, setting up the platform to be a part of the multi-culturalist consumption phenomenon. What we tend to forget is that art is much more exciting and alive than this ideology of political correctness contemporary curations would lead us to believe. The political correctness of the curators here is a machine that has drastically suppressed cultural memory and filtered out the content moulded in a new globalised language. Stylistic dialogues that were shaping up during Indian modernism and early post modernism (like the conflicts between the Kerala Radicals, the Baroda Narrative School, Post- Swaminathan Abstraction) were largely disrupted or forgotten.

The Argument:

How hegemony shapes commonsense cannot be explained through blanket arguments. What one did observe however was that artists increasing felt the need to think of their works in terms of an image. Art writers complimented this trend by reading the work almost literally like texts. Moreover, in sophisticated art theory the author had been declared dead, so it gradually became unfashionable to talk about the gestural, the ‘manner’ the ‘style’. Maybe this is not so problematic, as much as harm caused by our loss of skill to read an image in terms of its excess. In theory we all knew that the image has an excess that far outweighs the domain of meaning, yet the only manner in which we engaged with the excess was in terms of size. Curation too, played a key role, doing largely theme based shows, and it is only in the arena of new media that mainstream space for purely formal works were encouraged.

As the first world falls into chaos, and the focus increasingly falls onto the local, we begin to realise that the knowledge dominance of contemporary neo liberalism is being questioned on the streets of Europe and America. Also that the financial world is travelling in which evryone is confused about changing tastes, markets and viewship. The idea of the audience is shifting. Yes we are at an early stage of the shift, but increasingly some artists are coming out bolder in their journey away from the content. There have also been artists who have resisted the hegemony of spectacle and content which have straddled art criticism and practice, and there is a sudden new interest in viewing them, and trying to contextualize their practice in contemporary art.

I am going to focus on four such artists. M Pravat, GR Iranna, Saba Hassan and Sambhavi Singh, to talk about this shift in more detail. I have been seeing their work in various capacities, as a friend, as a critic, as a curator. I will attempt to layout how these shifts in practice and viewership have imprints of hegemonic shifts possibly worth investigating.

Four Case Studies – Direction for Art and Practice in contemporary India

First Part of a 3 part upload

Laying the ground :

Among the many developments that marked developments in field of contemporary Indian art in the last few years (actually about a decade now) has been the dominating focus on works that prioritize socially and politically charged subject matters over stylistic experimentation and conceptual investigation. Artists that created social realist, political pop works that provide for and conform to a kind of collective imagination of a Indian society have been gaining so much recognition since the late 90s. Soon we came to see a trend where in the mainstream believed in playing down technological and formal density in order to purely divert the attention of the viewer towards the content of their depiction. Their insensitivity to the method and obsession with materiality and social content runs through their entire practice that leaves little room for anything else.

The optimism of the market gave a huge boost to the confidence and ambition of the players and continues to feed into a ‘bigger means better’ frenzy. There are resources to open large galleries, stage expensive productions, mount large-scale exhibitions, produce large catalogues and host luxurious opening night parties. All of a sudden everything is possible. Artists responded to such optimism with attempts at mega-productions. Artworks and art practices are discussed and perceived, not from an artistic and conceptual point of view, but from new criteria such as their size, production budget, market price and preference of collectors, and then (finally) their meaning. (Thankfully) The global trend of buying and exhibiting Indian art on an international level didn’t really reflect the artistic thinking and working in the country but instead indicated the growing importance of India as a economic power and a cultural phenomenon.

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Somehow these two phenomenon are interrelated, and it now sets in that the success of contemporary art, was not entirely an artistic triumph. The works of art that caught the international attention during this period were attributed to a more ideological connotation than what their innocent creators designated them to be and categorized as various forms of political statements by foreign curators and critics. This was then translated into a market interest that would go on for years and energized the practice of many Indian

artists and curators.

In fact, the extraordinary success of these artists and their sudden wealth has been a curious phenomenon in the Indian art system. This particular value system has been magnified and underlined by the established neo liberal pragmatism of the entire Indian society. An artist’s success and recognition is always and purely measured against his market price and performance. There is almost no other way to approach and discuss an artist’s work apart from what kind of social realist content the work carries and how this can be translated into an impressive price.

Report on the Delhi Burqa projections at Turkman Gate Old Delhi by Sophie Ernst

published in http://khoj2006publicart.blogspot.in/

A version of this article was also published in the Art India Magazine

Report on the Delhi Burqa Projection Workshop (background to the performance)- The Delhi Burqa Projection workshop was conceived and led by Sophie Ernst, video artist and Assistant Professor, SVA, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. She centered the performance on six young Muslim women students of Jamia Milia Islamia University (Nazia, Padma Renu Sonowal, Heena Yusuf, Sana Jafri, Bushra Hassan, Rukshana) who were the participants in the two-day workshop conducted. The workshop was centered on issues of ‘identity’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘absence’ and ‘spatial constraint’ in the context of young Muslim women, embracing, political and religious and aesthetic concerns.

A part of the process of the workshop was to make the participants shoot short videos, which were later, edited by Sophie. The process of the workshop itself included elements of drawing and certain other forms of communication like debates on ‘freedom’ for Muslim women in the public sphere and more specifically in public spaces, and ending with sessions on training the participants to video shoot and eventually leading up to the participants shooting short video footages.. Sophie later edited the video footages, and these footages became a key medium (as imagery to be projected) in Thursday’s performance. (I have not attended the...details picked up through fragmented conversations with the workshop coordinator)

Burqa projections at Turkman Gate Old Delhi: The event was framed, as a ‘Performance’ Students of Jamia Milia Islamia would be presenting their work done during workshop. After the workshop the Sophie along with the participants, choose a location for presentation. The goal was to present the work in a public space and open up the dialectics of the workshop to a wider audience. The sites chosen were lodged in the narrow lanes behind Turkuman Gate...a mosque outside Al Noor Hotel, and Chitli Gali. The young students presented six short video pieces, as they negotiated their way through the chaotic crowds and their unfamiliarity with equipment.

The participants took turns playing an actor, wearing a white burqa, walking through the space, while the one of them playing the operator would be tracing her movements with a video beam. The white burqua became the screen where the video clips where projected. The bright shaft of light coming from the projectors acted as a device which flattened the three dimensional volume of the actors transforming them into images on which the video clippings were super imposed.

However if one has to frame the Burqa projections at Turkman Gate as a Performance then it is imperative that one will intereogate the ‘performative’ aspect of the event and negotiate deeper into its contextual value. Sophie Ernst’s workshop and the Performance leading out of it, cannot be viewed in isolation and needs to be seen as a carry forward of a similar project she did with students of Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, leading to a ‘Performance’ at Delhi gate, Lahore. I have not witnessed the Lahore performance, but video footage of the ‘performance’ has been edited and presented by the Sophie as almost as an independent product. The video filters out the entire locational ambience and showcases the ‘walks’ in fleeting cuts (re) presenting the performers almost as if they are icons sleek and fleeting across a ramp.

Sophie lets her instincts of a video artist take over at two crucial junctures of the process...first as the editor of the video clippings shot by the participants, and most importantly as the agency who shoots and edits the final ‘performance’. As a video artist who exercises near complete agency over these two key areas (determining the look of the projections and determining how the ‘performance is re-presented), Sophie’s authorial instincts overtake the spirit of a workshop and cast it as an site of art production over which she exercises a dominant agency.

However, what I find most disturbing about Sophie Ernst’s intervention is the ideological formulations informing its foray into the ‘politics of representation’. The burqua has become a universal symbol of ‘the oppressed Muslim woman’; it has emerged as an easy trope enabling artists to comment on issues of Islamic patriarchy and repression of women in the public sphere. However, in both the Lahore and Delhi workshops, Sophie ‘casts’ college going young Muslim women, who do not wear burquas in their day-to-day lives and drapes them with burquas.

Though the act of projecting video footages developed in a workshop around issues of ‘identity’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘absence’ and ‘spatial constraint’ on the burqua, and acting it out in (Muslim) male dominated public space can be subversive, the subversive potential is undermined by Sophie predetermining the suppression in their lives and superimposing a outsider’s notion of ‘freedom’ onto them. Moreover at a formal level, the manner in which the bodies are reduced to a flat screen, which enacts a role predetermined by Sophie, allowing them to be completely objectified, very problematically raises the very questions of ‘identity’, ‘stereotyping’, ‘absence’ which the workshop and ‘performance’ were allegedly seeking to address.

It is true that certain ‘poetic’ moments emerged, that evening and the ‘performance’ did generate a lot of local curiosity. However the moments were nearly too fleeting to register, and the crowd that had gathered did not get to interact with either Sophie nor with the workshop participants, thereby weakening its impact as an intervention in the public sphere...in the sub continent it is way to easy to draw crowds, the real test is what one does with them.