The Anatomy of Celebration
or
The Party ‘Plot’
photographic micro-narratives
The Party Plot is a new genre in terms of public spaces that host weddings, functions and parties in Gujarat. I live right next to one, and there are ten or more in the vicinity. They represent a lucrative enterprise : agricultural land grapples with the encroachment of urban development to produce instant, temporary financial benefit before being absorbed into the frenzy of residential construction sites.
The temporary ‘sets’ that are erected are more and more elaborate and spectacular as the years pass, and create yet another architectural genre.
The decibel levels are unimaginable – several such events happen simultaneously in the same locality, giving rise to a new genre of music, one best described as phantasmagorical – and sometimes death-inducing, as a few persons are reported to have died of cardiac arrest at the intersections of such celebrations.
There are certain sounds that one will never hear again; the receding whine of some of the louder firecrackers is, in actual fact, the sound of a dying frequency; we are rendered progressively deafer as yet another, perhaps less dire consequence.
Music mimics music, to an audience that mimics enjoyment and can no longer appreciate the difference. Both have evolved through a series of simulations and estrangements that have long since obliterated their origins in experience, and are reduced to incomprehensible abstractions.
All this, against the background of an otherwise troubled political climate and the stringent moral policing that has become a part of the nightlife of Baroda and Ahmedabad, makes it even more inexplicable.
Still, it is a visual experience - with a darker edge. I shot some very shaky video footage from my terrace, and during a walk along the highway at night. The digital media are an unavoidable part of our lives, and therefore incidental as opposed to an artistic choice, at least in this case. I wondered what I could do with the footage. The content seemed more like weird wonderlands in haphazard sequence, with no obvious narrative; the handling of the camera was hopelessly inept. There emerged, however, from this set of dysfunctional relationships, the undeniable fascination of glowing nocturnal dreamscapes shot through with dazzling explosions of light - panoramic artworks that performed a significant function in mediating the events that were staged in their midst, on a scale and with a conviction that is not often achieved in the ‘real’ world of art. Addicted as we are to pondering on the function and meaning of art as opposed to so-called ‘reality’, it was intriguing to see how interchangeable the two were.
Notes and Investigations / 2008
The attempt to process the material was deferred, till some of us were invited to a media workshop at the Uttarayan Art Center, Baroda in October 2008. Given the necessary time to examine the contents, the act of looking, as a starting point, involved isolating the frames that interested me and breaking down the footage into a series of stills. They were then re-composed digitally into a set of panoramic landscapes: the moving image is temporarily stilled, and again set in motion by virtue of a slower and more controlled process, at a painter’s pace. The struggle to understand is therefore the discipline, the method and the form; the stable factor that enables this struggle to be staged is the specific orientation peculiar to one or the other medium. Two very different kinds of sensibilities interact to create a third set of possibilities.
These photo-panoramas are in miniature format, to use a contradiction in terms; printed like running text in a notebook, impelling a closer scrutiny, a reading, an excavation that leads to strange discoveries. The original prints are ten feet long. As a variation, they were sized to fit into two pages set in a notebook format; hence ‘Notes and Investigations’, at the formal and conceptual level, by a natural and mutual convergence.
Other mutations subsequently emerged, and the temptation to retrieve, from a position of technical disadvantage and cultural bewilderment, the source - the moving image, and the impulse that created it. Some of the stills and bits of footage were organized into four groups, and four short videos were composed. The challenge of finding a form that could accommodate these and other discrepancies in a coherent manner was a collaborative process that involved working with a film-maker, Achint Jain.
We decided to keep as close to what was recorded as possible, to excavate the drama that is embedded in the seemingly non-dramatic. As an artist, one has come full circle in that one finds the real more fantastic than anything that the imagination can conjure: that intriguing, recurring inversion here sets the stage for aesthetic discourse. It begins to seem like art could be far closer to truth, or shed light on it in a way that exposes the mirage that stands in for reality.
The Disorientation of Donald Duck / 2011
The central motif in the videos is the nuptial pandal/ canopy, or variations of it. Earlier, the entertainment involved semi-cabarets that carried the celebrations to a pitch of hysteria, regardless of the presence of children: a breakdown of conventional morality, in the garb of a social institution designed, paradoxically, to propagate it.
Adrift in a world more fantastic than Disney could have ever envisioned, Donald Duck’s meandering passage through the landscape, with a wraith-like Santa Claus trailing in his wake, is telling in more ways than one. Those earlier, deceptively benevolent icons of so – called ‘western culture’ are now mere ghosts, pale in comparison to a layered carnival of cross-referential simulations and covert sexuality that they cannot participate in.
Frenzied male dancers near the pandal stuff currency notes into the mouth of the accompanying drummer in an anticipatory pre-nuptial orgasm - a grotesque, indeed inhuman parody of the earlier, perhaps equally questionable but marginally more gracious custom of showering the performing artist with gold coins as a mark of appreciation.
The white plastic chair, in multiplicities or as a singular motif, stands mute in more ways than one, a complicit witness to the proceedings.
The term ‘micro-narrative’ carries implications that extend beyond this particular body of work. Among other things, it is an appendix to the broader, more overt context of a project which I worked on for many years in post-2002 Ahmedabad.
The two however are closely related.
As a painter whose affinities lie with the fragility and power of the brush mark, the experiments and excavations that this body of work represents is one more reflection of the continuing location and interrogation within artistic practice, of media that answer other needs and occasions. The slow, painful imparting of bone, flesh and spirit that marks handcraft, the flash that captures the instant : they give rise to differing perceptions of time, and therefore belie a connective temporal and spatial matrix which is all-pervading, and omnipresent. The micro-narratives embedded within it, in terms of stories as well as the sequence and history of evolving methodologies that tell these stories, are deceptive in that they seem tinged with the tantalizing aura of transience and detachment, novelty and precedence. What is unique, however, is not the medium but the re-configuration that marks every deviation or inclusion - the path that one chooses in finding one’s way through new spatial and temporal maps, with the continuing awareness of the distance and closeness between oneself and an ever-receding horizon.
The extensive use of cosmetic devices such as photoshop and aluminium composite board (which is used to clad the outer surfaces of buildings and is the true architect’s nightmare) assumes a special significance, one of equivalence with the artifice that is being investigated. One arrives at these choices through a process of research, creating thereby an ongoing commentary – there is an aesthetic investment, and also a discourse.
The reflective surface of aluminium echoes and re-creates the fascination that was the original and ruling impulse in creating this body of work. Photoshop dissolves and fuses random prose to create poetry in its place. As the old proverb goes, set a thief to catch a thief. By consuming, and allowing oneself to be consumed, one uncovers a certain lost agency, feeling – desire, longing, yearning, consummation and thereby a return to a place of origin through the swirling, bewildering eddies of collective, orgiastic ritual. Something has happened after all, within the heart of that bejeweled, carnivorous bloom set in an emerald field.
Could one argue therefore that at least one very clear, if not primary function begins to emerge for the artist in the present time?
Vasudha Thozhur
July 2011
