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Arts & Reviews |
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Review |
Original Is Overrated
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| Spiral Jetty explores derivation in contemporary art |
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Published : 1 September 2010 |
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NATURE MORTE |
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| Mithu Sen’s ‘In Our Hands...Nothing (Egon and Me) 2.’
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OBERT SMITHSON, AN EARTHWORK SCULPTOR, created a remarkable piece of art in the 1970s on the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Using basalt rocks, mud, salt crystals, earth and water from the northeastern shore near Rozel Point, he created a huge counter-clockwise spiral on the shallow bed, which is only visible when the lake’s water falls below a
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certain level. Built on site, entirely out of local material and subject to the changes in its environment, the work, ‘Spiral Jetty,’ evoked ideas of location, belonging and authenticity.
The ongoing exhibition at gallery Nature Morte in New Delhi uses Smithson’s masterpiece as its title, with seven artists—Anita Dube, Abhishek Hazra, Pushpamala N, Josh PS, Jeffrey Schiff, Mithu Sen and Seher Shah—reacting to a received idea, philosophy, pre-existing art object or form.
The derivative, as the exhibition note puts it, is a term often viewed as pejorative. This notion stems from our glorifying the idea of some immaculate ‘original’ thought, influencing in turn our definitions of originality, authorship and skill. However, far from being derogatory, the exhibition posits that all art consists of receiving input and responding to it. Reference and quotation have been the leitmotifs of our postmodernist times, typified by the innumerable reworkings, homages, spin-offs and adaptations in the creative world. An artist Is, because (s)he responds.
Text plays a dominant role in Anita Dube’s works, while her use of ‘poor,’ context-suggested materials—candles, meat, wood, velvet and ice—refers to the art movement Arte Povera, which focused on making art that stemmed from an experiential and thus ‘authentic’ understanding of the world. Introduced in Italy during the period of upheaval at the end of the 1960s, the movement promoted the use of ‘natural,’ organic material to break down the hierarchies between ‘art’ and common things.
In ‘Meat Word,’ slivers of meat form the word ‘Prison’ on a block of ice resting on a gunnysack. Strong in its concept and execution, the work delivers a potent message with its imagery of incarceration, entrapment and torture.
In ‘Ah (sigh)’ and ‘Oh (flower),’ large words are formed using tightly packed Diwali cracker-like candles glued to the canvas. In ‘Ah,’ the word is composed in Hindi over a newsreel-like image of men fallen on dusty ground with currency notes scattered in front of them. Saddam Hussein’s face on a note suggests the location is Iraq. Streaks of blue wax have melted from the lit candles and flowed onto the image, evoking a vision of blood around the men (have they been shot?). The unpredictability of how the wax will flow and alter the image’s interpretation, along with the suggested meanings the men and the scattered money, not least the magnified text that evokes the titled sigh, make ‘Ah’ a layered and engaging work.
In ‘News’ Josh PS recreates in oil a newspaper front page that looks as if it could have been taken from an old textbook. The headline, “Direct action day rioting,” refers to the Great Calcutta Killing of 1946, a day of widespread post- Partition violence in the city. In his other work, ‘Below the Dark Side of the Moving White Clouds,’ Josh paints Lucknow’s famous La Martiniere building in Company School-inspired watercolours, continuing his style of recreating in large-sized oil, tiny photographs from the colonial-era.
Jeffrey Schiff’s ‘Vedic instruments’ presents found material and suggests through the title their alleged provenance and antiquity: old and mouldy wooden ladles, string instruments, toys, hammers and padukas (wooden footwear used by saints). Together, they appear like objects at an archaeological dig, and, individually, offer different readings: discarded household items; objects with religious associations; playthings. Without confirmed information about where the objects are from, the work appears without context and is difficult to decipher.
Mithu Sen’s offerings, ‘In our hands…nothing (Egon and Me) I and II,’ incorporate the work of early 20th century Expressionist painter Egon Schiele, considered shocking in his time for its open, raw sexuality and obsession with death. In Schiele’s paintings, women are often portrayed as sexual objects, there to serve the central focus of the paintings— his sexual preoccupations. Sen uses Schiele’s near-skeletal dark arm with long fingers, recurrent in his paintings as the sexual agent, and places against it a female arm that’s part animal, made of flesh and fur, her own creation. This arm, perhaps hers, is strong, fleshy and pink, whose pincers are about to snip or pierce violently the extended, passive-seeming Schiele hand. Through this image of suggested sexual violence, Sen takes over the former role of Schiele, with him now being preyed upon, a dramatic role reversal. It works as an organic response to Schiele’s work, and includes a critique of his sexism.
In the second work, this interplay between Sen and Schiele expands into something transformative. Schiele’s hand appears again, this time with its forefinger thrust inside a cow’s vagina. It is now being sucked on by the foetus in the cow’s womb; the sexual and violent hand turning into a tender and nurturing one. The death-obsessed Schiele hand is converted into this pro-life form through Sen’s own charged imagery.
Both Sen’s paintings forcefully rework a received image to provide radically new interpretations, and in light of the exhibition’s theme, these pieces are the most powerful.
In ‘Is My ID Me or Is It My Dog?’ Abhishek Hazra comments on the proposed unique ID card system for all Indian citizens. What will the cards say? He hangs scores of ID tags from cords, filled with random first-person utterances about habits, likes, mobile ringtones, medical information, etc—the kind of personal trivia that is breathlessly shared in an information-saturated world. Framed by the hung cards, a screen shows stills of Hazra being led on a leash by a woman against a backdrop of large dam construction in India of the 1940s. The work draws from the 1960s performance of artist Valie Export, who walked Peter Weibel, also an artist, on a leash, on all fours, through busy Vienna streets. The ID tags provided by the government will be a lot like dog tags, Hazra seems to suggest. This critique of modern India is accentuated with the reference to another of its pet projects, large dams. Shown working on them in the photo backdrops are scores of poor construction workers; the poor that modern India has forsaken, and treats no better than dogs. Hazra reworks Valie Export’s original act, whose concern was an extreme form of ‘women’s liberation, to talk about the other person in the work, the dog-like man, bringing in his own current, localised concerns.
In ‘Fondling Data Models,’ Hazra refers to Yves Klein’s well-known monotone work of the 1960s, ‘Anthropometry,’ where naked women covered in blue paint made body impressions on paper, a work that was criticised for its implicit sexism. Hazra, interested in the meeting points of culture and technology, likens Klein’s models to those used in scientific systems, wishing to refute the latter’s assumed lack of agency. A calculus equation appears over the image of Klein’s painted women in a looped video.
In another part of the same work, Klein’s figures (impressions of the models’ bodies) are magnified to increasing proportions on sheets with equations drawn in the background, until they entropy into constituent particles. It remains unclear how Klein’s ‘models’ specifically affect the chosen scientific system and vice-versa or how this builds on Klein’s work to say something new.
In Pushpamala’s series Travelogue, she photographs herself in tourist photo studios against painted backdrops, dressed in traditional clothing of the cultures she visits. The posed images recreate a past, drawing mocking attention to the touristy penchant ‘to see the exotic’ in globalised places, and thereby achieve ‘authenticity.’
The works in the exhibition, through their wide-ranging registers of artistic response, make for perfect sites to see the received triggering off the new.
What was once, will be again.
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