A Short Note on PostmodernIsm

PostmodernIsm 

Dilli Dur Ast: A lens based artist camp in the walled city of Delhi.

Written as the Critic in Residence:Published in Art India Magazine 2006

Three very different artists…completely different approaches to the medium called lens…some very decent chemistry…and some great hunger to explore…you get the makings of a good artists camp. Not that all work that has produced is very good…they have their own tryst with failures…but then again, the point is not always centered around object hood.

When I approach a theme based workshop…it is always important to be able to grasp what influence the structure of the workshop has on the artist and her methods. It has been quite interesting to grapple with the way Atul Bhalla, Himanshu Desai and Gigi Scaria have tried to impose a structure on the workshops and how they went on to take different roots. The workshop started with the artists going on early morning walks, taking still/video footage and meeting people in the neighborhoods around Turkuman Gate. Quoting a line from the concept note#,

“The idea is to intervene or understand the city in which we all live more closely with”   

it seems that structure of the workshop was predefined by the desire to be the flâneur: to intervene ‘visually’ into a romanticized space, armed with a certain greater access to ‘knowledge’, and with certain desire to explore and re-present the ‘other’, maybe in an attempt to understand the ‘self’ better. At an overtly political level there is a positioning of this workshop in the discourses around identity.

“The walled city of Delhi also poses certain questions on the "modern'' identity of an urban citizen. What exactly makes the old city different?… “What exactly contributes to a city's boundaries to exist?…The 'boundaries of a city’ function today more as a metaphor than specific geographic locations.”#

However, the workshop was not really about macro political concerns like the schizophrenia of urban identities; it was more about a focused retreat, which inspired a particular kind of self/artistic introspection…often playing out intimately political articulations.

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Atul Bhalla: Early morning ducumentation 

Display of Atul Bhalla's Piao

Atul Bhalla has had a long running with water…centered on its aesthetics and politics. Coming from a sanitized environment and dependent upon ‘bottled’ water, he has been drawn to the various (still) available sources of free water. For Atul the walled city has been like a resource overflow, harbouring in it an infinite collection/variety of free drinking water sources: Piaos established by Muslim, Jain and Hindu religious institutions. Still surviving as the only visible source of free drinking water, in a city where the middle class takes branded water as a recent reality.

But reading this nature of involvement only through the prism of politics is too much a single layered reading of Atul’s engagement. His attraction to the various Piaos in the city is definitely rooted in the realm of aesthetics. He has a very poetic understanding of form, and it is through this engagement that he has been ‘framing’ the Piaos. Atul reveals in being very consciously artistic, in his acts of capturing and strategizing the re-presentation of his ‘framings’: in giving an aesthetic validity to an object of his attraction…usually passed over as ‘mundane’.  Through this last month Atul has had a near meditative engagement with his process…, the  early morning walks, exploring the space, discovering the histories… it has been a journey in many ways. A journey rendered significant by Atul’s constant re-thinking of what art is, and exploring the boundaries of what different modes art making can take. The set of still photographs clicked in a the course of the month, document various Piaos in the walled city, shot with a great fondness for ‘form’ and a fine talent for locating beauty. 

footage clipping. Artist enacting the Halal

Atul’s experience of the workshop and his notions around art production went on to take a completely radical turn around the second week mark of the workshop. Researching on the various lore and legends around water, Atul stumbled across the phonetic connection between Bahisht, and Bhishti. One the Urdu word for life and the other a water carrier made from goat hide, used to carry water through dry parched deserts. Atul was fascinated how the Bhishti a product of an act of killing can have a semiotic resonance with Bahisht. 

The semantic overlapping is infact because of a long-standing understanding of water as life. Drawn and intrigued by this phonetic parallel Atul set off on a journey to create a Bhishti from the very scratch…to create a source of life by taking life first. The entire experience of learning the Halal and eventually doing it and from then on to getting the Bhishti made has been a parallel performance played out in the backdrop of this workshop.

The video, which captures the Halal, strongly challenges the ‘image’ of a Halal embedded in our psychic.  The focus is rooted in the experientiality of the artist…showing the blood and struggle of the animal were easily available means to make a startling video, but that is simply not Atul’s style. The video is instead a very disturbing piece more because an artist has turned ‘butcher’ for a morning a yet ‘the event’ is showcased in the most tranquil manner possible.

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Gigi Scaria’s involvement in the workshop is as an artist and very crucially as a conceiver and the keystone of the workshop.  One must admit, what simply as a workshop concept, it is a wonderful imagination. The manner in which the “Project proposal combines an agenda to explore a medium and through that to explore culture, is a model that needs to be picked up. As someone who envisaged the spirit of the workshop, it was interesting to see Gigi laid back and spends a lot of time soaking up the retreat value that the camp within the walled city offered. The laid back quality was not around the nature of activity; in fact Gigi has been active energy point through the workshop, he just relaxed his art producing instincts…and instead chose to ‘listen’ to his environment.

The four videos he has produced are direct accounts of his ‘listening’. One sees in Gigi an ability to connect with a certain strata of urban youth who usually invoke disdain. His videos are intimate encounters within the walled city mostly focused around the poor youth, a calendar maker, a metal scavenger, or simply a young boy sleeping on the street. Gigi has the ability to humanize them for us, displaying an endearing sensitivity and fondness towards the ‘private’ dimension in their lives, which somehow always escapes our imagination.

The artist’s rooting in visual arts speaks out in the manner in which Gigi composes his frames, a definitely painterly engagement. However he does succeed in not letting the ‘aesthetic’ make the work any less intimate, and engaging.  

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Clipping from Gigi Sicaria's video 'Chitli Quabar'

Gigi Scaria’s involvement in the workshop is as an artist and very crucially as a conceiver and the keystone of the workshop.  One must admit, what simply as a workshop concept, it is a wonderful imagination. The manner in which the “Project proposal combines an agenda to explore a medium and through that to explore culture, is a model that needs to be picked up. As someone who envisaged the spirit of the workshop, it was interesting to see Gigi laid back and spends a lot of time soaking up the retreat value that the camp within the walled city offered. The laid back quality was not around the nature of activity; in fact Gigi has been active energy point through the workshop, he just relaxed his art producing instincts…and instead chose to ‘listen’ to his environment.

The four videos he has produced are direct accounts of his ‘listening’. One sees in Gigi an ability to connect with a certain strata of urban youth who usually invoke disdain. His videos are intimate encounters within the walled city mostly focused around the poor youth, a calendar maker, a metal scavenger, or simply a young boy sleeping on the street. Gigi has the ability to humanize them for us, displaying an endearing sensitivity and fondness towards the ‘private’ dimension in their lives, which somehow always escapes our imagination.

The artist’s rooting in visual arts speaks out in the manner in which Gigi composes his frames, a definitely painterly engagement. However he does succeed in not letting the ‘aesthetic’ make the work any less intimate, and engaging.  

 

Gigi_Scaria_Old-Cityscapes: Exhibition dispaly

still from Gigi Scaria's video  'Search   2'2

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Himanshu’s engagement with work production has been an interesting duel between imposing his gaze on the walled city, and learning back. However, Himanshu Desai is more of an ‘actor’ than a listener. His video ‘Scenes from a Hallucination’ is a revelation of a new age re visitation of the flâneur. In a certain sense, the video is also an introspection of the artist’s own engagement with hallucinations…using fragments from others’ stories Himanshu tries to communicate his own anxities.  

What takes the video to a greater aesthetic realm…beyond an out cry of an introspective soul is the artist’s long term engagement with sound and how that engages with his use of visuals. Himanshu revels in making sound videos…but this particular one has been a jump for the artist in the manner in which he has treated the visual dimensions. However it needs to be pointed out that the video has many elements of class voyeurism, and in a certain sense it does come from his ‘high speed’ work production mode. Sometimes I have found the video a shade over rendered…but mostly ‘tripped’ on the artists construction of ‘hallucinations’.

It was even more interesting to follow the artist in his postproduction phase. When he moved into making posters and various other paraphernalia, which were needed to give a screening a ‘movie hall experience’. But the efforts of this phase will be witnesses when it all comes together on the open studio day. Meanwhile Himanshui has gone on to shoot and edit another video…a lens based critic of the workshop….

Stills from 'Scenes from a Hallucination'

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As this report is finished the artists have entered their last phase of planning the display…the zeal to showcase the months work and their personal journeys in very strong. Then the finished works will slowly begin to speak louder than the process. One must admit that it has been a great pleasure seeing artists work through the entire period of the workshop to be a participant in the delights and the anxieties   

not worth fighting

by Rahul Bhattacharya on Thursday, 04 November 2010 at 14:34

a smile on a fragile face
seeing narmada from dharaji
mornings
nights
the last rains of the monsoon
window sills
birthdays
tiny dreams
powercuts
the strength of magic
so many cups of coffee
a bath by the river

collateral damages of an army assault
in kashmir
in delhi
in assam
in nagaland

don't feel like fighting back
the army has no conscious
its not worth fighting against

We are on the same Boat Brother: Probir Gupta

     

In the dystopia of Jihadist contemporaneity, the history of Judaism in India offers Gupta a ray of hope...a beautiful constellation of memories and histories through which one can celebrate alterity and propose (a) new humanism(s). Jews of India, (unlike) the Jews elsewhere, have had a peaceful history and though, economically they have never been able to match up with their Euro American  counterparts, they have led a happy life here, living comfortably with Hindus, Muslims and Christians[1].  In the year 2006, Gupta painted the famous ‘The Bene Israel Family[2]’ (Acrylic and iron oxides on canvas). This Bene Israeli[3] community rose to prominence and thrived in the Indian sub continent, at a time when Jewish communities faced persecution in Europe. The distorted pink background draws on the history of the Holocaust whilst the Bene Israel family emerges from this background in indigenous attire, as native Indians of the subcontinent. Along with this, there was another canvas ‘Islam the Caretaker of the Bethel Synagogue[4]’.

 This beautiful reality was dismissed as whimsical myth making by his American white audience. As a response Gupta comes up with a deeply researched and layered ‘We are on the Same Boat Brother’, a work through which the artist digs deeper to present the Jewish synagogues in Kolkata as symbols of the accumulative heterogeneous culture of the Indic subcontinent[5].

  

‘Islam the Caretaker of the Bethel Synagogue’ depicted the family of Khalil[6] (a poor Muslim family of Orissa) who have been looking after the Bethel Synagogue for many years now, and with the dwindling Jew population of the city, two of his sons[7] (along with a have also begun looking after another nearly synagogue[9].   The assemblage itself (re) presents this vision of utopia, through layers of forgetting and nostalgia. Texts, objects and sculptures engage in multiple oxymoronic relationships, as if consciously highlighting the tension between the dominant dystopias and hidden utopias.  The sewing machine (like the distorted pink background of the ‘Bene Israel Family’) evokes a history of the Jewish History Museum  (Berlin), even as the video projection lingers on the contemporary history of the Jewish community of Kolkata, the two synagogues and their caretakers. We see the facade of the ‘Jewish School’, with a steady stream of young Muslim girls (students) gushing out, and an interaction with the owner of the city’s oldest Jewish bakery[10].   Gupta’s assemblages have a definite scenographic quality, and the ambiance created is unmistakably rooted in the ethos of old ‘Calcutta’ interiors, the figure of (goddess) Saraswati, the typewriter perched on a table, a large fishbone standing on an anchor, found photography and text, come together in both a critique of fashion and a proposal for alterity.

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[1] http://clarionjournal.typepad.com/clarion_journal_of_spirit/2007/07/the-jews-of-ind.html

[2] Currently in the collection of Saatchi and Saatchi

[3] The Bene Israel Jews speak Hindi and Marathi, the languages of the Maharashtra state. Once thriving and populous, the Bene Israel group now accounts for about 3500 to 4000 people. Most of them live in Mumbai, and only a few families live in Calcutta and Delhi. The majority of the Bene Israel, which is ten times their population in India, moved to Israel.

[4] Which has been acquired by a collector from Morocco

[5] The Jews of Calcutta came from Iraq and Syria and were known as the Baghdadi Jews. They were a prosperous lot. Then two events — the Independence of India and the creation of the promised land, Israel — changed the fate of the community here.

[6] Whose father Moharram Khan began working in the synagogue.

[7] Anwar Khan and Imraan Khan. Anwar, who are in their late 30’s.

[8] Magen David or the Shield of David stands on Biplabi Rashbehari Bose Road (previously Canning Street). It’s a five-minute walk from Bethel. Magen David has a tall spire that rises above the structure like a beacon, painted a bright red. But the entrance to this grand building is entirely hidden by stalls selling hairclips and other trinkets. The synagogue was built in 1884 by Ezra’s son Elias David Joseph Ezra, in the memory of his father. The synagogue is built in the Italian Renaissance style and has a red brick finish. It looked beautiful against the blazing summer sun. The interiors are as pretty as Bethel, prettier even. Ornate floral pillars shipped from Paris enhance its Continental look.

[9] http://www.telegraphindia.com/1081225/jsp/opinion/story_10296397.jsp

The Riders and their storms: Bengal and its Knights

 hi mike,

i am sending in a write. not exactly what you asked for (will mail you the survey of contemporary art in Bengal by tonight or this next morning). 

sending you a write that combines contemporary culture of Bengal with socio-political concerns. (the kind of writing i had proposed when we we chatted in your office).

this one is on KKR IPL and neo liberalism in Bengal.

a writeup sent to The Statesman in 2010 which they never published. 

‘What do you do when you are stuck on an island with a candle and no matches?

You toss that candle and catch it. Catches win matches.’

An old joke making a comeback over text messaging

In a lot of ways the Kolkata knight riders symbolize the aspirations of a so called new Bengal. It is not so much what a neo liberal Bengal can be…it is more of what an aspirational Bengal wants to be. Lead by Saurav Ganguly) the person who is responsible for giving hope to an entire generation of post Mithun Chakravarty Bengali youth), the success and failure of KKR might matter little to the lady standing all (k) night outside a  government hospital waiting for the her turn to meet the doctor in the morning, but it matters a lot to those aspiring to make a mark on the new cosmopolitan nation-scape. Maybe by god’s grace, or maybe through direct partnership with her, they managed to recruit Wasim Akram as the bowling coach…but can you win matches if you can’t score or save runs?

It will be unfair to blame it on Sharukh Khan, still it seems that the team plays more for the camera than for the scoreboard. Over the years, on an average KKR (k)night we are treated to perfect dives, perfects run  out attempts,  aesthetic lofted drives: and very poor results. As with most of the state, they play with/for pride which is either too far in the past or yet untouched in the future. The lost-found-lost matches against an array of opponents exemplified the KKR attitude of doing everything right for the camera and being the best looking team.

Before Nandigram unfolded, Buddadeb Bhattacharya was widely praised lavishly, rated as the number two chief minister in the country and we had the best looking economic turn around agenda. Even the team looked excellent. Corruption free politicians, neo liberal economists and a no nonsense leadership seemed poised to deliver the goods. Then it all happened. This highly rated good looking team failed to deliver a practical, effective economic turn around. All their demons came back to haunt them, and in two years they lost absolute credibility.

In the first league match against the Mumbai Indian, having failed to score an out right winning total, Mr Ganguly unleashed all his charisma on the field being the busy captain in a manner that only he can be. It was a tad sad to see that this gentleman (who is the first Indian to win the Dada lifetime achievement award) has come to a point when he would rather have god help him rather than he help him self. (This is a bit of an oxymoron considering in the realms of memory and imagination and hope he is still the god of the off side). However he was up against the god of winning easy games, and when it comes to an easy pitch and a friendly bowling attack, Sachin Tendulkar can do no wrong. Then in the last match against Kings of Punjab, a miracle happened. The Knight Riders scored two hundred runs. One watched in hope and wistfulness as Ganguly da moved his field around, changed the bowling attack and caused a couple of wickets to fall. He even ran a bit and stopped some runs. Still the match was lost in another good looking toothless effort.

One cannot really soothsay. Maybe Mr. Bhattacharya will win the elections and give us a developmental road map that understands demographics and real politics of Bengal better. Maybe Dada will get a chance to go topless again.  That’s not the point, what we all miss out is that both Mr. Ganguly, and Mr. Bhattacharya are but a reflection of West Bengal’s troubled attempts at being ‘cool’ and ‘happening’.

Outside Mumbai, Kolkata can boast of the most cut throat street cricket culture, yet we are at a loss at a game like 20-20 which has strong roots in the streets. With one of the highest density of graduates and post graduates the state was one of the best placed in harnessing the economic growth riding on information technology and service industries, yet we seem to have missed the bus. Is it time for us to interpret progress in our terms,rather than cheer our Don Quixotes and then fault them for fighting windmills.