‘Art is truth setting itself to work’
Martin Heidegger in The Origin of the Work of Art.
If one were to point out the exact historical moment when Performance art came into being, in a documented and marked sense, that moment would have to be the late 15th and early 16th century Europe, a period when Caravaggio and Leonardo Da Vinci staged short yet hugely animated spectacles, the former by enacting a ‘mock naval battle’ by flooding the courtyard of the Pitti Palace in Florence (1598) and the latter by directing a performance titled Paradiso in 1490.
However, Performance, as an element of artistic expression and development, has been an essential ingredient in art practice for a far greater period of time, inherent in the idea of art itself.
In the context of Performance art in the west, it was since the early twentieth century that artists began to make use of performance, by way of theoretical expressions, through speeches, recitations as well as musical recitals in order to experiment with ideas and concepts before resolving them through more conventional means like painting, sculpture and photography.
Performance manifestoes and the pieces themselves reveal that Performance art in the course of the 20th century became an alternative and radical means to enact, evaluate and articulate art experience in everyday life.
Performance Art in the West
‘Merde’, the first word elicited from the principal character in Ubu Roi, the first of such performances by Alfred Jarry in 1896, and the pandemonium that it led to in the crowds that had thronged to the Lugue-Poe’s Theatre de L’oevre, can be regarded as a pivotal moment in the history of performance art in the west. It was able to anticipate what successive events in the evolution of the art form would have in store for both the artists and the audience. What Futurism, Dadaism, the Bauhaus, Happennings, Fluxus and the numerous phases that performance art brought to art practice and into the public realm was an alternative means of artistic expression that enveloped both the performer as well as the audience in a single, whole art work. Art “must be an alcohol, not a balm”, Marinnetti’s words scream out. It aimed to disturb the space of conventional art practice by ridiculing it as ‘intellectual intoxication’ and ‘bourgeois’, insisting instead that artists use ‘real space and real materials’.
Performance in many ways has been both the apostle as well as the anti Christ of Art, in that it aimed to dislodge the ideas and principles associated with high art at the time, driving to ‘drag art down to the streets’. Performances in its early phases in Europe would often get deliberately scandalous, vulgar and provocative, saturated with offensive propositions, denigrating public figures and even the traditional arts like ballet or painting. All this was done in order to drive home this point as passionately and explicitly as its practitioners could manage.
Performance Art as a Genre
While the intimate and inherent connections that performance shares with theatre cannot be wished away, it would be important, in the same way, to acknowledge the close ties all art practice shares with each other, be it sculpture, painting, photography, dance and even music among others. All of these arts, while they take from one another, veer off towards their own distinctive means of expression and articulation.
The performance artist assumes a character unlike that of an actor in theatre. The content of the performance piece, in addition, is rarely like that of a traditional plot or linear narrative. At times the whole performance might last for a few minutes or may continue for several hours at a time. All of these performance pieces often take place without a script and are occasionally spontaneously improvised as well.
Performance art necessarily becomes public art since there is no tangible means to ‘publish’ it otherwise.
Performance art, interestingly, provides a nuanced way to understand art process- the process and thinking that goes into the creation of an artwork such as a painting or sculpture that articulates the negotiations the artist undertakes.
Why Performance
Artistic expressions in a postmodern world, as Michael Camille suggests, has seen a ubiquitous engagement, on the part of the artist, with the realm of ‘felt experience’ rather than with external means of representation, “simulating not an illusion of the real but affirming the whole realm of ‘sensation’ ”. We live in a world that Richard Schechner describes as one of ‘multiple literacies’, where people are overwhelmed by bodily, aural as well as visual data. All of these, in a sense, are performative- actions, spectacles- that are relentlessly brought to the fore in our everyday negotiations and interactions.
It is for these reasons perhaps, that there has been a move away from painting, sculpture and the image, towards installation, environment and performance.
Performance Art in India
The task of mapping Performance Art in India necessarily entails a prolonged and relentless endeavour, an initiative that must be collective and dogged in its pursuit. Sparse and moreover scattered accounts of artists, art works as well as brewing activities certainly hint at the appropriation of this exciting and malleable medium. However, the bulk of the work remains to be done. It is only by creating platforms such as this one, that Khoj has proposed to initiate, that efforts of artists can be collated and analysed effectively, in the effort to create the all important discourse that must accompany the evolution of any and every art practice.
Reasons for delving into the marginal genre of performance art are varied and range from those that displayed a preference for the medium to begin with to those for whom performance art turned out to be the only economically viable option. Others’ turn to the art practice was conditioned by a sense of disillusionment and discouragement they had faced from galleries and patrons.
Performance art entails a necessary engagement with the issues of the nature of the art work and the grounds that inform it i.e. the ontological and epistemological reality it originates and functions within. Kristine Stile’s remarks on Performance art assume importance even within the Indian context, where performance art works can be seen as ways of exploring issues of sexuality, gender, class, nationality, forms of social suppressions, particularly of the body as well as the “stifling constructions of subjectivity”.
Artists such as Surekha, Sonia Khurana, Pushpamala N. and Jasmeen Patheja have done a considerable amount of work that reflects an engagement with the notion of gender and identity. Works of others such as Mrs Manmeet, Shantanu Lodh and Sushil Kumar question, and provocatively so, the taboos and norms that govern society, that create rules for what the body can and cannot do. These ‘stifling constructions’ affect the political domain as well as reflected in the performance works of artists such as Indersalim and Anita Dube. All of these artists along with many others (this report is by no means is a comprehensive documentation of performance artists in India) have displayed a considerable amount of grit and tenacity in resolving to continue with their often unrecognised and un-patronised art work, holding firmly to the belief in their creative practice. Government apathy, strangely enough, has at the same time, allowed the artists concerned, to remain autonomous, which is essential in order to register protest or articulate concerns that are personal, political and/or social.
The artists and works discussed in this essay are symbolic of the widening parameters that make up the discursive space of art in India- a space that demands critical engagement.
Art practice- Sculpture, installation and performance.
Performance pieces-
1. Keywords, live performance recorded on video, Khoj Studio, 1997.
2. Via Negativa, photographic performance work, Nature Morte, 2000.
3. Noor Muhammad, performance video work, 2003.
The body is an integral component in Anita Dube’s work, be it sculpture, installation or performance. For someone who has in the past decade worked with the found object, which she then manipulates, performance has yielded yet another genre/medium where she can explore the possibilities that her body provides through means that are literal- eyes, flesh; social- gender; and political- identity.
Her performance works are self portraits in a sense that, within the liminal moment of the performance, are able to highlight the multiple roles she inhabits as an individual, a gendered subject as well as a communal entity. In the moment of transcending the real time they are performed and recorded in, her works become self-reflexive insofar as they provoke, disturb and endure virtually, through video and photography.
The first and only live performance she exhibited, at Khoj in Modinagar, Keywords, was an attempt to interact with the audience by enacting the role of a butcher, a mundane and frequently visited reality, familiar to most people. However, it left her disappointed with the lack of response it was met with.
For Anita, all her art works remain ‘work in progress’, ideas that she constantly refers back to and doesn’t rule out returning to. They are spaces that are still to be explored, excavated. “Performance is an area I will continue to step into from time to time. In fact he [Noor Muhammad] is somebody who can always rise from the ashes”.
Her attraction to performance art lay in the possibility of direct address it offered. Also in a place like India, the body, a primary element in Performance, is the cheapest thing for anybody to use, starting out as an artist. “You can speak and communicate almost anything with the human body. It is in many ways, the most versatile object or tool in that sense”. In fact, the paucity of people who are willing to step into this arena is a source of surprise and disappointment for her, a phenomenon or absence rather, that she understands as coming from a lack of exposure and theoretical foundation for young artists in the country. As she correctly points out, performance is completely free of the market diktats of money and publicity. Its almost free, can travel easily in the form of a recording, through photographic prints or better still, take place as just a live performance.
Performance, as she explains, allows her to maintain a seamlesness between reality and artificiality- what art is all about for her. The Noor Muhammad video stands as a prime example of this thought. At the time the video work was conceptualised the national elections hadn’t yet taken place. The B.J.P., India’s right wing party, was still in power and the Gujarat carnage was still very much alive in the public imagination. Dube felt that she had to attempt to tear apart the stereotype that had been created about muslims, both in the country and across the world. “I have grown up in Lucknow but I will never be able to stand up for the community the way I wish to. Our social norms do not allow me to assume that identity, even though I have grown up with it. He is, in a sense, my alter ego. An identity I deserved in every way. Culture is funny and even ironic that way. But performance art or Art rather, allows me to take on that identity, to shift my pivot and in so doing, transform myself, my gender and socio-religious identity and destabilise the stereotype that we are all to aware of and continue to patronise. I wanted to infuse it with the dynamism that it actually possesses.” One of the most powerful performance art works to come out of India, the video allows the artist to exhibit the anxieties of a historical subject, his political vulnerabilities as well as his personal trajectory. The personal though, becomes also a filter to gauge the public in its most violent and disturbing state, thereby assuming epic proportions through that act.
“Subjectivity is very important for me. While my works may comment on a macrocosmic level, they have to begin nonetheless at a microcosmic and personal level.” That becomes a way, according to her, to maintain a subjectivity and open-endedness in her art work.
“After the video, as an example of how all of my works are always in progress, I took certain stills from the video and made another performance work, through still images, called ‘The Nine Contemporary Rasas’- about how a normal individual morphs from a happy go lucky chap to one who is inducted into right-wing propaganda”.
Performance art has allowed the artist to explore the fact of power and how it operates within the realm of the social and political. By exposing herself to a viewer, she unmasks other hidden realities, theoretical tropes and ambiguities of identity.
Shantanu Lodh write up-
1. Bit by a fish called Jharna. Live performance documented through photographs. 1998.
2. Film Banners (Remix). Photographic performance work. In collaboration with Inder Tikku alias Inder Salim. 1998.
3. Your Humble Servant. Live performance in collaboration with Inder Tikku alias Inder Salim. Documented through photographs. 1999.
4. Boxwallahs. Live performance. In collaboration with Inder Tikku alias Inder Salim. Documented through photographs. 1999-2000.
5. There is a hair on my tongue. Photographic performance work. Exhibited by putting up posters on roadside walls in the city. 2001.
6. Forgetting the air (filling my breath inside lamb lungs). Photographic performance work.
7. Art and Anger. Live performance in collaboration with Sabine Marte.
8. I Slapped my (semi-colonial, semi-traditional) Father. Photographic performance. B/W. 2001.
Shantanu Lodh defines his art practice as that of an interventionist. His work is autobiographical, the premises being those of the family and of his personal relationships. Shantanu came to Delhi in 1997, trained as a painter. However, the city and his experience was to change the trajectory of his career quite drastically. In spite of his efforts, his works as a painter did not yield any positive results. The behaviour of the galleries on the contrary proved to be humiliating and discouraging. Disillusioned by the responses, Shantanu decided to stay outside the space of the gallery system that he considers to be elitist. This was to have a lasting impact on the nature of his work and outlook.
“I have my own sense of historicity that differs from that of Nehruvianism and Gandhiism. A secularism that praises the work of Amrita Shergill fails to notice that while Shergill had stopped painting nudes [after coming to India] Ramkinker Baij was still fighting for nude classes in Shantiniketan. That sort of secularism is ludicrous for me”. “My conflict is not one of a pluralistic political voice, I work from the margins”.
Art practice for Shantanu Lodh comes out of a personal disillusionment. He looks to use a personal premise that in turn mirrors what happens at a macrocosmic level. “Just to speak about the larger picture- political upheavals or globalisation seems contrived to me. I want to speak about me, about us. That for me is far more important, to highlight the contradiction here, around me, in my friends, my social circle”.
Shantanu sees performance as a democratic tool that is economically viable to tap into. Pragmatics is what made the artist turn to performance to express himself. “As a school teacher I cant afford to invest in the tools I require to make my artwork”. Even earlier, after being rejected by galleries across the city, turning to performance allowed the artist to work on his own terms and without any compromises.
Provocation is an essential ingredient in Shantanu’s artwork. “My artwork tests the tolerance limits of the others, for whether they like it or not, I am expected to tolerate their opinions…but to what extent will they tolerate”. However, he is quick to add that the intention of the ingredient is not to startle. Rather, in a self-reflexive manner, provocation is used to map the mindscape, to document the norms and taboos that function within society and control people, their actions and reactions. Shantanu’s art, in that sense, works within the logic of performance art very clearly. His controversial works effectively demand a reaction from the audience, making them active participants in the performance that works on the idea of inclusion.
For him, being an artist is an existential commitment. “For me an artist is a person who enjoys life beyond functionality”. The artist is unconcerned about the space of exhibition that has often been a street side corner and even a school basement for which invitations were sent out privately. “People are scared of the streets here. This is in contrast to war torn areas such as Iraq where there is a lively graffiti culture. That is of no concern to me. I continue to write on the wall, paste my posters on the wall. I do it at my own time and with my own money. I am not concerned about the public/private divide, but I am interested in showing my art”.
Although a performance artist, Shantanu does not see any relation between his art practice and the realm of the traditional performing arts. “I don’t like traditional performing arts. Traditional always rests on the ritual but fails to take from itself. It is a space where only the act of the ritual is considered important but not the performer. For me, putting attention on the performer has always been far more important. The artist is far more important. But somehow, tradition does not accept that”.
In fact Shantanu Lodh’s first encounter with performance as a genre came in 1999 when he performed ‘Bit by a fish called Jharna’ in the basement of the school he teaches in. It was the rituals he had to perform, after his mother passed away, during the funeral ceremony that acted as the catalyst for the performance work. The piece is thus a critique of Brahmanical rituals. “What Brahmins perform in fire rituals is, in my opinion, a rape of the land since they don’t produce a single article out of all that they throw into the fire.
Film banners was the first of many photographic performance works Shantanu performed in collaboration with Inder Salim. The performative posters, chromolothographic posters of the artist with collaborator and fellow artist Inder Salim were put up in the city in Mandi House as part of the exhibition. “Conflict is central to my work”. The work along with his other pieces reflects an active drive to rebel against institutions, in this case a state that does not recognise homosexuality. In another instance, Shantanu along with his wife and fellow artist Mrs. Manmeet, started a poster campaign that intended to subvert the state suppression of expressing affection in public spaces. Thus photographs of couples kissing were invited from various people in a campaign that was conducted via emails. “We didn’t post the images publicly because of fear. I am a school teacher and I had to consider this other aspect of my life”. Fear is an element that is widely prevalent in the city, according to him. And although he candidly admits to being fearful of the consequences of his provocative artworks, he nonetheless strives to stretch the boundaries with his artistic expressions, testing, as mentioned earlier, the taboos that govern society. “I take liberties. I’m a libertarian in that sense, not an activist. Although there is an element of activism in my work, it is quite frankly limited by fear.
I Slapped My (semi-feudal, semi-traditional) Father is perhaps one of the most daring works to have been produced in India. Shantanu attempts to subvert the notion of patriarchy by standing naked in front of his father while serving him tea and then in turn waiting on him with an empty teacup. The performative work is an ideal example of the microcosmic nature of his art practice that consequently mirrors and subverts larger tropes of patriarchy, of state control and subjugation as well as of colonial values.
Shantanu considers his performance pieces to be quite bland. In keeping with his dogged opposition to institutions and subversion of clichés of the artist intellectual, he is very conscious of not allowing his art work to impose on people, on the audience. “What I wish to create is a situation where the viewer can walk away thinking ‘even I can do this’. To democratize the field that is art becomes an intention that interestingly traverses the dual terrain of postmodernism as well as activism.
Shantanu sees the art establishment in India slowly changing for the better. With an increased reception of art, galleries in his opinion, are becoming more receptive to artists that work on the margins. “Although people’s reaction to my art practice hasn’t changed”, he declares candidly.
Shantanu does not see performance art in India as a movement at all. “Performance is not a serious art practice in India even today”. While he does acknowledge efforts being made in different parts of the country, it would require much more of a concerted effort to consider it a movement.
Further information on the artist as well as on Mrs. Manmeet can be obtained from artmaharaj-artmaharaj.blogspot.com/.
Performance art works-
1. Bird- Performance Video (B/W, Silent), 2000. Performed, shot and edited by Sonia Khurana.
2. head-hand- performance video, 2004 (Colour, silent, 7 minutes, looped). Performed, shot and edited by the artist.
3. Flower carrier
Sonia Khurana would prefer to call her art practice ‘Visual Media Art’ rather than Performance Art. “Ive been hesitant to use the term performance. Of course there is an element of performance in my work. But its more than a mere action. It’s a concept that I work with. Nor is performance the overarching intention of my work. I am of the opinion that the former term, being more elastic, is better suited to define my work as an artist”.
Although Sonia started her career as a painter in 1993, she soon found herself disillusioned with the work she was creating. Surprisingly, she stopped painting right after completing her Master’s from the Delhi College of Art in Fine Arts in 1993 at a time when her work was being met with much appreciation. Things remained like that till 1997 when she received the Inlaks scholarship to pursue another Master’s in Fine Arts, this time from the Royal College of Art in London. The earlier period of dormancy she recalls, saw her gravitating towards the works of Maya Rao and Navjot Altaf. “I felt the desire to use my body as much as I could”.
Performance Art comes very close to suggesting how visual artists actually work, how they negotiate the still hazy terrain of their as yet unfinished work, according to her. Bird was made in 1999 actually, the year she passed out of Royal College. “I hadn’t realised the full extent of the performance aspect in my work as yet. Performance was still new for me and I sort of took it for granted initially. I would say it had been there in my paintings as well. My first piece was a revelation for me. It allowed me to understand that the self can talk about the world, reflect as well as articulate it. The body, for me, became a site where the events of the world are played out”.
Bird, shot with a shaky, hand held camera, is a short film where the artist records herself naked, her body attempting to transcend her own flesh, the material existence she inhabits. Her stubborn, though helplessly gravity bound body attempts to undo the existential fact of her material existence that becomes a metaphor for exploring other forms of limitations that exist in society, often those that overlook sexual difference.
Sonia Khurana is of the opinion that performance art is radically different from dance and theatre. “Its very conceptual. Performance art is very much about the immediacy of the body and the moment. Some things come alive in a certain space in front of an audience. Playing out roles of sexuality and gender allows me to resist certain modes, of transcending boundaries that I don’t think can be achieved through other means. Its very fluid.”
Head-hand, a seven minute video played in a loop, inverts the conventional model of the female protagonist as the object of a voyeuristic gaze/negotiation. What appears on the screen is a male character. On view and in a sense abstracted from the body is the bald head and face of a black male, constantly probed by the artist’s hand, far more pale in comparison. It is this interplay that becomes the focus of the performance piece. At times gentle and soothing, at other times aggressive and violent, the silent piece presents a multi layered negotiation with race, gender, sexuality, fetish as well as power, a notion that enters into each of the before mentioned issues.
The Flower Carrier, her latest work, as her repertoire suggests is far more nuanced than the earlier works. Inspired by a passage from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the video work records the artist’s brave and meditative walk through urban landscapes, all the while maintaining a stoic expression as she continues to focus on an artificial, plastic flower, a red rose. As she walks down busy streets, some in India, others in Europe, the viewer can witness how the unknowing public receives this picture of a seemingly possessed woman, oblivious of the people around her. But the video is as much about her meditation as it is about how the people respond to the artist, mocking and laughing at her at times, at other moments unassuming and uncaring. “That was a true performance for me. The walk was very important. The video takes a life of its own and my journey continues”.
Sonia Khurana, save for one occasion during the performance art residency in Khoj in 2006, does not perform in front of a live audience. “I don’t think of an audience at all, my camera is my only audience”.
According to the artist, the recording of the piece isn’t a mere documentation. The performance is in fact a cinematic moment. “Much of my performance video work is predicated on the idea that video extends the impact of performance, adding the possibility of remote and future audiences for a one-time presentation. The video camera also changes the nature of performance, enabling an intimacy in which artists would do things in front of a camera that they may not do in the presence of live audiences. Through video, the performance could become endlessly present, always enacted for the first time.”
Sonia senses that there is definitely something brewing with the performance art scene in India in spite of the complete absence of government patronage for the genre. “But we cant afford to be too self congratulatory with it. Its still at a stage that is nascent.”
“What is disconcerting is that we are taking more from the visual markers that have been left behind by other performances outside the country rather than from the discourse about performance art.” According to the artist, the art form will truly come into its own, once the focus shifts to discourse.
Probably the most prolific performance artist in India at the moment, Sonia Khurana travels and works between Delhi, London and Amsterdam.
Jasmeen Patheja is an artist based in Bangalore. She initiated the Blank Noise- a project on street harassment in 2003. Her experiments with performance art have taken place within the orbit of the project that looks to highlight the incidence of eve teasing and molestation, a regular and recurring feature for women across the country.
Performance art, in this case, functions within the activist mode, where the art work is used as a means to address a societal evil in imaginative and powerful ways that reaches out to a cross section of society.
The year 2003 saw the Blank Noise project conduct a number of workshops and performance art works that dealt with issues of ‘clothing, public image and public perception’ and sexual harassment in public streets through projections, photographs, installations as well as video works.
A novel way in which the project utilised performance was by way of a performative intervention. One Night Stand, recorded through photographs, is an ongoing project that involves the project members and participants conduct a public vigil of sorts where they collectively spell out “Y R U LOOKIN AT ME”, by pasting single letters on their clothes and appearing at different traffic signals, at times in the middle of the day and at other times in the evening, confronting and at the same time addressing the public through their silent performance-protest.
Jasmeen’s own performative video work, Samachar, consists of the artist taking on the role of a news anchor in a powerful evocation of the injustices that women suffer in society. The richly nuanced performance piece sees the artist repeatedly narrate different alleged reports of rape and sexual assault in a setting that resembles a professional news room studio. The power of the performance lies in how the artist oscillates between a number of different types of renditions that make the facts appear mundane and sanitised at first but that gradually begin to appear more and more violent, owing to the brutality of the acts. It is through a process of repetition and abstraction of the most explicit parts of the reports that slowly brings the injustice of the acts to the fore that demands an engagement on the part of the viewer, privy as we are to these often heard and read narratives.
Jasmeen Patheja’s work reflects the commitment of an artist who believes in the efficacy of performance art as a form of activism that can articulate concerns that affect the larger socio-political arena.
The project that she started in 2003 continues with the task of interventions, using art as a medium in the public sphere. More information on her project can be accessed from her blogsite, blanknoiseproject.blogspot.com.
Performance Art works-
1. Phantom Lady or Kismet- photographic performance work, 1996-1998.
2. Sunhere Sapne (Golden Dreams)- photographic performance work, Modinagar, 1998.
3. Dar-i-Dil (The Anguished Heart)- photographic performance work, Raina Haveli, Delhi, 2002.
4. Bombay Photo Studio- photographic performance work. 2000-2003.
5. The Popular Series (Native Women of South India- Manners and Customs)- photographic performance work, 2000-2004.
Pushpamala’s tryst with performative photography began in 1996 with Phantom Lady, a photographic essay that took two years to complete. Other such imaginative works followed that have, in the past decade, established her as among the leading performance artists in the country today.
All of the artist’s works reflect a profound engagement with performance, explored and exhibited through photographs, and a studied negotiation of the roles a woman inhabits in society. Dressing up and enacting these varied roles allows the artist to stage these different, often conflicting identities, for instance that of a timid and reserved housewife who then transforms into a glamorous heroine. The staged identities are drawn from a rich source of references that might be categorised within the over arching term of popular visual culture. This includes cinema, advertising and studio photography along with a seasoning of personal memories and experiences.
The many hued photographs appear amusing and riveting at the same time. The materials she works with, black and white film or hand tinted images, are both, in a manner, images that abstract from the indexicality we are accustomed to. Together with the layered complex of identities that are showcased in the works, the photographic moment is able to transcend its material existence and gain a status that is iconic and self-reflexive at the same time i.e. the images serve to enact a stereotype and subvert it at the same time. The concept of performance is a key ingredient in her work as the photographs involve a masquerading of identities and the respective garbs that make up her ‘gender’, a process that involves implicating the self as a subject as well as the object of art.
The hint of playful mockery serves to instil a freshness in her photographic works, humour being a rare inclusion in the works of performance artists in India otherwise.
Surekha -
Performance art works-
1. Reaching Myself- 4 min. 42 secs. Performance Video Work projected onto wall over the artist lying on her side.
2. Juhannus Midsummer- 7 min. 35 secs. Performance video work, 2001.
3. Theertha- a moment of strange stillness. Photographic performative work.
4. Line of Control- 3 min. 2003.
5. Bhagirathi Brings the Water- 3min. 53 secs. Performance video work, 2004.
6. One To One- 14 min. 15 sec. performance video work. 2004.
Surekha’s performative video and photographic works are powerful allegories that transcend the intimate and personal and manifest a reality that is political and omnipresent. Her performance art becomes a telling reminder of the role of art in articulating concerns that reaches out beyond the confines of the gallery and/or rhetoric of beauty.
In ‘Theertha, a moment of strange stillness’, the artist creates a pilgrimage of sorts, having photographed herself in a meditative pose, with legs crossed, arms stretched over her knees and eyes closed, in a host of different locations that include lush, green valleys and other such open vistas, car parks, restaurants and even pavements next to busy market places, all the while maintaining a calm, composed and meditative disposition. Notions of spirituality that a viewer might dwell upon are entertained in the green, picturesque locales that appear at first but become suddenly disturbed as the photographs gradually shift our attention to crowded spaces next to vendors, intrigued and amused customers, city dwellers. All the while, the artist remains unperturbed, implicating along with herself, the unwary crowds into the performative work that dwells on notions of peace and tranquillity. Her own material, affected presence in the photographs serves to instil a surprising calm, a strange stillness in that sense, even in compositions teeming with people, captured in a haze, as they rush to complete their daily chores.
Bhagirathi Bringing Water, a video work shows the artist first sitting, then lying and eventually getting up from inside a bathtub, which is constantly overflowing with water and filled with flower petals. The artist continues to submerge herself into the water all the while as her voice over narrates a pithy folk tale, about Bhagirathi’s sacrifice that allows a village to avail of water, which miraculously fills up the only pond that had been dry before. The video shows two screens that continue at the same time, recording the performance that sees the artist silently and lyrically negotiate the water and the flowers, eventually getting out of the bathtub. The last statement as the body straightens up reflects on how she keeps “reading the news about women drowning in the water….”
Surekha’s poignant and discerning works, sensitively created, reflect a subtle engagement with the notion of performance, showcasing a moment that is personal, but at the same time alluding to the possibility of realising other moments that address issues of identity, injustice and belonging.
Sushil Kumar is a maverick artist whose practice shows a conscious resistance to institutionalised art practice. His work directly and indirectly questions notions of beauty, of appreciation, of creativity and even goes so far as to question the audience and what it means to view an art work.
“My ideas comes from everydayness. When you see my work, you should come away thinking, ‘even I can do this’! Engagement with the everyday is very important for me. After all that is what links art with life.”
The point of departure, for Sushil Kumar, lies in extending the everyday and ‘expending’ it into an evocation of nation and memory. Thus, in a work like Bootwala, the artist re- enacts the familiar punishment doled out to students, that of being made to assume the pose of a ‘Murga’, and subjecting himself to a considerable amount of exertion and pain, crawls, hops and trudges along a crowded street in Khirkee Village, before reaching the doorstep of Khoj. The re-enactment here becomes a critique of a recognised punishment at one level, the prolonged exhibition of which allows for its cruelty to come to the surface. But the performance, by entering the public realm, performed as it was in front of a live audience, becomes a critique of society as well, of how we view such acts, with indifference, with amusement or even with pleasure. The artist broods further on the multiple meanings of the act through which it becomes possible to view the concept of ‘lesson’ as “learning, teaching as well as violence” at the same time.
“My performance is an axis-mundi that can open up to a number of entry points. The effort, at all times, is to break out of my conditionality- to break free from the shackles.”
Another performance piece, titled ‘Habeas Corpus’, sees the artist trace the contours of his own body, as he lies naked inside a house with visitors looking on. On conclusion of this act, the marked space is then filled up with shoes, with names of people written on them as well as business and identity cards scattered all over the footwear. While the performance includes the artist reading out a poem towards the end, just this simple act becomes a powerful critique of identities that become objectified and are drowned within the hysteria of war and strife. The body remains a mere trace, its phenomenological existence forgotten within the created chaos.
The artist has much to say on the issue of activism. “I dislike this talk about art and activism, it’s a matter of convenience for the critic. Life, for me is nothing without activism”. But at the same time, he doesn’t wish to shout about it from the rooftops. The connotation that he’d much rather use is cultural practice, which he considers to be about empowerment rather than politics that “is always about power”.
The appeal of performance, for Sushil Kumar, lies in its directness. It allows the artist to make a human intervention through his/her body, something that takes place “in real time and space”. “You can engage with a person totally. The audience cannot be passive in a live performance. And participation and intervention on the part of the audience is very important for me.”
A parting remark serves to explain the nature of Sushil Kumar’s artistic proposition when he says, “my creation is a suggestion, you can react any which way.”
Performance art works-
1. Film Banners (Remix). Photographic performance work. In collaboration with Shantanu Lodh. 1998.
2. Your Humble Servant. Live performance in collaboration with Shantanu Lodh. Documented through photographs. 1999.
3. Dialogue with Power Plant’s Shrill Across a Dead River
4. Shit of the Other- live performance. Khoj, 2006.
5. Nafrat Karnay Waloon Kay Seenay Main Payar Bhar Doon ( i pump love into the hearts of those who hate)
6. Say No To Death Sentence, Indian Social Forum, New Delhi, 2006.
Indersalim displays an existential commitment to his art practice. As a performance artist he describes his work as ‘mental, environmental and social sync art’. Taking inspiration from Felix Guattari, Indersalim sees his task as infusing contemporary art practice, through the genre of Performance Art, with a radical edge, re-defining its parameters and creating, in the process, a new aesthetic paradigm.
This commitment is manifested, first and foremost, in the pseudonym he wishes to be referred to by, Indersalim, symbolic of an amalgamation of a Hindu as well as muslim identity, something the artist considers to be a performance in itself.
Through works such as ‘Dialogue with Power Plant’s Shrill Across a Dead River’ and ‘Shit of the Other’, Indersalim constantly strives to question preconceived aesthetic value judgments and notions of art by including the realm of the socio-political into his art work.
“Shit of the Other is a piece, which I did at Khoj last year. I simply carried some shit in my right hand (left behind by children of the homeless or labourers of the city) from Press Enclave Road to the Khoj Studio. I did it with a candle in my left hand, and dropped it into a jar that I later filled with Formalin solution (a means of preserving it). That became the object for exhibition, instantly.”
In another work, titled ‘Say No to Death Sentence’, the artist drew out the words Azadi in Urdu on to a large piece of cloth upon which he placed a cane with ‘Police’ written in English. “The performance at ISF (Nehru Stadium) was clearly marked with my protest against the state which represses, and at the same time it marked my solidarity with the people who are fighting for a cause. The word AZADI (freedom), which I incorporated in the structure of my performance (see some images in blog) was not only about the people who are actively in it, but about an agenda which is about liberation of the spirit of 'the human being'.”
On the issue of what performance art means to him, the artist’s opines philosophically, “ If colour vanishes or gives in to the thought in front of an audience [in the case of a painting for example], or if the sum total of material, in a sculpture vanishes, then the body too can vanish in a performance while yielding to a 'thought'. But if the colour or material can accompany ' the thought' then the body too can accompany ' the thought' in a similar fashion. So, a painter, or a sculptor, knowing by the very process they are in, that their work will perform or represent their thoughts successfully, becomes similar to a performance artist's act, wherein the body of the artist somehow merges with the thought.”
Indersalim is of the opinion that an audience is an integral part of performance art. “The audience, the other, is the third corner of our existential triangle. Mahatma Gandhi's Salt March was a performance. It was about the people and politics of that time. There was defiance in the act. This is a big example, but in every good performance the audience has to be alive, and the responsibility of that space-time energy falls squarely on the shoulders of a performance artist. A performance can happen anywhere, inside the room, alone, out there on a street, on a stage even. Personally, I am not keen on performances that are done without audiences. In any case, I believe that artists have to connect with the audience, indirectly if not directly.”
Although the artist does take inspiration from western performance artists such as Joseph Beuys and Marcel Duchamp, he situates himself firmly within the context of India, immersing himself, as his works suggests, in the social and political contexts that affect him as a human being and an artist.
Further information on the artist can be obtained from indersalim.livejournal.com/.
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Note: This is not a Khoj Project related report. Khoj had commisioned Akshaya Tankha to do a independent research about Performance Art in India . Submitted on March 08, 2007.