Madhu.V : In Praise of Slowness

This recent set of paintings by Madhu.V. has had a long gestation and bears the markings of the passage of that perhaps ascetic time in its somber palette and its patiently layered surfaces. Into a rather minimal, unvaried setting of interiors that evoke a nearly monastic gravitas in their stillness and symmetry, he introduces an almost self-contained object-world comprised of an assortment of tools, implements and organic matter that suggest another, now mostly forgotten sense of time where the laboring body might still have had some sense of continuity with the cycles of the natural world and its seasons, and where the social habitat was likewise attuned. The objects themselves are diverse, and draw upon a limited but varied inventory of images that the artist has acquired and put together over the years; they range from the tools and implements used for various manual tasks to medicinal herbs and the fruits of the earth and evoke, by the accompanying insistence on their rich tactile and visual qualities, their history of human association that is further reflected in the patina of use that seem to envelop them. These objects are hung from hooks or upon railings from the ceiling in a manner that recalls, at least to those brought up in Kerala from where the artist hails, an ‘uri’, - a suspended larder (consisting of a set of pots that were stacked one upon another) that invariably graced one of the soot-stained corners of the traditional kitchen, where such a device was employed in the days before refrigeration to keep food from spoiling. The suspension is also a visual device to isolate the object, much like a specimen under scientific observation in order to define its particular qualities more clearly as well as to reflect upon it in the manner of an altar or icon that reveals its mysteries slowly and over a period of time; the artist makes this aspect of his work clearer when he writes that, “A laboratory is a space for detached observation; this observation demands a kind of objectivity. This detached viewing can be made possible when we place the object in a specific location; I see an analogy in the way that the tools and objects I find in everyday life are often suspended on bamboo sticks. I am rearranging these objects in my ‘mental interiors’ in order to observe the relationship between them and my own four walls.” This evocation of an almost numinous object-universe animated by some mysterious, underlying life-force has resonances with spiritual traditions such as Shinto; it also serves to underline the accretions of memory that are embodied in humble household objects as well as to eulogize the heroic nobility of physical labour.
One of the significant aspects of this body of work is the way in which Madhu foregrounds the issue of time that is here mediated through the twin, interlinked concepts of nature and labour. Philosophers like Paul Virilio have drawn attention to the ways in which the increasing speed of technologies of transmission such as communication and transport have shaped the contemporary social, political and cultural landscape; he also underlines a paradoxical aspect of this situation, - the pervasive inertia that marks day to day life as a consequence of automation becoming more widespread and creating a population more engaged in sedentary tasks than ever before. There is also a long tradition of Marxist thinking on the subject of ‘industrial time’, put forward by historians such as Eric Hobsbawm in order to explain a particularly Modern notion of temporality that makes the rhythms of nature/ the body subservient to that of the machine, - in the way that, for instance, the arrival of the railroad into the countryside disrupted not just an existing structure of social relations that had been until then based on the rites of agricultural labour which in turn depended upon the changing of the seasons, but by introducing the brute fact of accelerated change into their cognitive universe, precipitated a rupture in deep-rooted habits of perception as well. Capitalism (which largely structures the contemporary world/experience), in order to survive must innovate continually and constantly; its Utopias are founded on a vision of the triumphal march of technology that is reflected in its real-world corollaries, intensive industrialization and mechanization and the unregulated exploitation of natural resources. What Madhu proposes in this body of work through the strong association that these objects have with the pastoral is the rediscovery of another kind of temporality that has largely been repressed in contemporary urban life, and by extension, the possibility of a different mode of Being that implies other ways of relating, not just to Nature, but also to other human beings and to the social totality. His oeuvre thereby comprises a refusal, or a repudiation that can be observed in the fact of the total absence, within this hermetic universe, of the articles of Modern technology or of any trace of the technological imaginary (unless of a very primitive kind) as such; on the other hand it posits a psychological and spiritual space that is grounded in a more organic and fruitful relationship to ones tools, the emphasis on their handmade qualities here functioning as a kind of doubling wherein the tools themselves are a product of human labour, and where labour itself becomes a form of pleasure. One should also perhaps add that the artist is not blind to the ironies of his current situation, - a chronicler of agrarian/pastoral pleasures who has been displaced to the metropolis and its alienations, he marks this discomfiting fact in his paintings through the ways in which he refuses any organic and simplistic notions of community, or the sentimentality of tradition recalled as nostalgia by the many subtle disjunctures that he works into these assemblages through their setting, or through their juxtapositions, wherein their ‘primitivism’ is undercut by its proximity to the ‘modern’. His interiors are alternatively cloister-like and prison-like, suggestive simultaneously of both a space of reflection and one of confinement, and these objects could also be read as constituting an inventory of loss.
The emphasis on ‘vernacular’ experience as an organizing rubric politicizes what could otherwise have taken the form of a romantic celebration of an uncomplicated pastoral mode, which is in itself an ideological fiction; it is deployed here on the other hand in the service of a tenuous remembrance, and as a reminder of a forgotten half of contemporary life, functioning as a testimonial from the peripheries of the subcontinent, its villages and small towns, to the struggles for survival and livelihood among the wretched of the earth. Their iconicity thereby engenders a double significance that is articulated in opposite directions, being on the one hand a paean to an existence more in harmony with ones work and respectful of the natural order, but at the same time commemorating the humble labourer and his world whose fate under the dictates of global capitalism remain uncertain. They also allude indirectly, by virtue of an almost obsessive return to a site of imagined innocence, to the insurmountable difficulties, - now compounded under the new economic regime - that the rural artisan and labourer has always been faced with, and which manifests itself in our own time in the periodic convulsions of militant violence and/or suicide that mark the interior of the subcontinent. The organic matter that he has chosen for display that makes up the other part of his oeuvre, which include common garden plants highly regarded for their curative properties, - aloe, khus, etc, - signify the long lineages of communal and traditional lore in the villages and evoke an eco-political conception of the relationship between labour and nature that gestures towards a former self-sufficiency and symbiosis that is now increasingly under threat due to sweeping changes in the mode of existence in the countryside, but also in light of the ongoing efforts by corporations to privatize vast areas of our natural wealth. Madhu’s oeuvre attempts to map out in their complexity themes of labour and its relationship to landscape and memory by meticulously working through the fractures and divisions that exist in the discourses around the idea of the rural, and by holding it in his works in its tension while at the same time resisting the pull towards closure or premature resolutions. In doing so he provides us with yet another reminder of what the village stands for in our collective life and what it could signify, and stands as a silent admonition to the amnesia that we are all too often culpable of.
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Madhu's works can be seen at http://madhuvenugopalan.blogspot.in/

Gigi Scaria : The Archaeology of Urban Life

It would not be an exaggeration to call Gigi Scaria an ‘archaeologist’ of urban spaces, more particularly in his case that of the city of Delhi, where he has been living now for the better part of a decade. ‘Archaeology’ here refers to the range of methods and techniques deployed by the artist in order to bring to light what has lain hidden; it implies excavation and depth, an attentiveness to the sedimented layers and accretions of historical time, and approaches the city as a palimpsest of traces. One can also divine a vision of the artist’s vocation underwriting the method; it has a critical dimension that sees his work as a dissection, as an analysis of social structures that makes visible the conditions that necessitate them and that it hides. The archaeological metaphor that organizes and runs through his recent work is a logical extension of concerns that belong to its prehistory, which saw the artist involved in a cartography of social structurations (what he calls “social mapping”); - the newer work draws upon and retains in a transformed manner elements of his earlier engagements. The cartographic and the archaeological form the two axes of his current body of work, articulating the conceptual grid across which is distributed a series of relationships, - surface and depth, the new and the old, the spatial and the temporal, the historical and the political, and so on, - that are played off against each other in order to draw out a complex set of correspondences that delineate the histories of the present and its often fraught relationship with Modernity.
The immediate impetus for these works is his adopted city of Delhi, but looked at askance with the eyes of a settler or the squatter, - a subject-position often adopted or identified with in his works; it is a hard-earned familiarity that is rooted in a very provisional sense of entitlement. The experience of migration and cultural difference that his work is often prompted by provides him with the framework within which he elaborates his narratives of contemporary urban experience. The journey to the city is a recurring trope within the many narratives of Modernity, and has been characterized by writers such as Ashis Nandy as a mythic voyage to the boundaries of the self, in which, if it has to survive at all, the self has to be reconfigured anew in line with an entirely different set of parameters and demands. The city becomes a locus of displacement, and the journey a flight from the often rigid hierarchical (in terms of class, caste, familial affiliations) social structure of the village or the hinterland to a place where identities are more fluid, - an event that has been seen to be central to the forms and formation of Modernity. The impetus to migrate is of course in itself prompted by a lack, - by, among other things, the concentration of capital in the metropolis and by its burgeoning labour market, and the journey becomes, correspondingly, a vaunted passage into the great experiment of Modernity and its institutions of citizenship. More often than not, as the literature of displacement informs us, it was a promise that was not made good.
The video titled “A Day with Sohail and Maryan” (2004) is perhaps one of the more ambitious explorations of the subject of migrant labour within his corpus; it describes a day in the life of two waste-pickers, and is filmed in a quasi-documentary mode, with the two protagonists re-enacting parts of their everyday life for the viewer. The work is consequently an ‘intervention’ as well, having been made with the full knowledge and participation of those whom it portrays and on whose behalf it is ostensibly speaking. There is an added poignancy as well as significance in the fact that Sohail and Maryan are collectors of garbage, which represents, in a sense the ‘outside’ of modern civic life. Through the glimpse that it provides us into the workings of an underground economy whose goods are the detritus of our everyday lives, the video urges us to reflect upon the relationship between consumption and waste, as well as its bearing upon a social order that defines itself in terms of its proximity to one and its distance from the other. These considerations are framed within the larger question of citizenship by the analogy that it draws between their labour and their status as migrants; in a sense, the two protagonists are themselves a kind of ‘refuse’, positioned as they are along the margins of the nation-state. The video work called ‘Site Under Construction’ also amplifies an underlying theme in many of these works, - the proprietary attitude of the bourgeoisie to the institutions of civic life, and ‘encroachment’ as the only method for the migrant to reclaim a space for himself as well as to assert his presence within the body politic. The video stages a guessing game played by two upper-middle class neighbors over an interloper’s mysterious activities, which seems to be constructing something out of bits of debris. The denouement, in which the protagonist violently demolishes the remains of his labour, is in a way predictable, but also appears inevitable in terms of the narrative drive of the work itself: its thematic integrity does not admit of any other resolution.
Both colonialist, and for quite different reasons, nationalist civic initiatives revolved around the regulation of public spaces, - the bazaar, the fairground and so on, - underlying which was the tacit assumption that these were zones of filth and disease carrying with it the attendant dangers of miscegenation, and whose disorderly flows it was deemed necessary to bring under control for the proper workings of the state. Innumerable studies have demonstrated the equivalences between the spatial organization of the city and the regulatory mechanisms put in place by the state in order to contain the alleged potential of public spaces to collapse social distinctions, and by extension, the social structures upon which its existence is predicated, - which were often rationalized in terms of the larger public interests of sanitation and health, and which a technocracy of engineers and architects were entrusted with translating into its concrete body. A city like Delhi was further seen to incarnate the spirit of the nation-state in its architecture, structure and organization; its staggered layout, - of administrative center, commercial and residential enclaves, and suburbs – created in essence a series of clear-cut demarcations between the center and periphery, (and also as a byproduct the division between the old and new cities), and along with it a deeply entrenched system of class divisions and power hierarchies.
Gigi invokes an imaginary cartography of the metropolis across different media in order to elucidate the relationship between the city and its metaphorical outside / outsider, by drawing attention to the discrepancies that exist between an order imposed from above and the anarchic tumult of everyday life, - depicted here as contending forces that lay claim to the city in a persistent but asymmetrical struggle. Primarily inspired by the numerous projects for the restructuring of Delhi, which, in the interests of reclaiming the city for its citizens shunt out of sight those that it cannot or will not accommodate into its self-representations, these works constitute an anatomy of a willed amnesia. The ordering of urban spaces is played off against the chaotic eruption of the city as a recurring motif in many of these works; in Panic City, a video animation, buildings do a lunatic dance, lurching upward and subsiding in parodic mockery of a soundtrack culled out of fragments from the Western musical canon. The impact of this work relies to a great extent on the cultural associations of the music (which comes to us as a part of the colonial legacy), as well as the tongue-in-cheek juxtaposition of its measured progressions with the spectacle of an apparently tone-deaf city. It also succeeds in engineering a switch from the conductor (of the invisible orchestra) to the administrator, whose shoes it puts us in, and from whose vantage point we see the scene unfolding before us. By inserting the viewer into a position loaded with investments of power, the work serves to remind us of own unexamined complicities in the exercise of citizenship, and of the privileges we take for granted.
The allusions within these works to the Modernist trope of the city as behemoth, - of the metropolis figured as living organism, as a site of potential chaos, and possessed of powers that elude control, - locate Gigi within a strongly Dystopian lineage (that counts among its exemplars Chaplin and Fritz Lang) often configured as an internal critique of Modernity’s own totalizing ambitions and which draws its repertoire of images from the anxiety that runs like an under-current through it. If the foregrounding of these anxieties situates him within a specific historical trajectory, it is coupled with, as a critical and semantic device which brings it back to its local context, a semiotic of the architectural façade/exterior that performs two interrelated functions within his oeuvre. The facade is a signifier of time, of a historical moment that becomes a loaded metaphor for the aspirations – political, social and cultural, - of a particular epoch (as one can see from works such as Delhi Now and Then). But it is also a mask or a screen, - both an augury and a container of hidden passions that simmer beneath its surfaces, as a work like ‘Somebody Left a Horse on the Shore’ exemplifies in its invocation of the myth of the Trojan horse . There is also the suggestion that it cannot adequately represent the multitudes (of worlds) that it contains; in the fictitious metropolis that Gigi evokes, it houses cities within cities, invisible cities, nested within each other in a vertigo of regress.
The façade thereby symbolizes, in microcosm, the body of the city itself, and in its allegorical dismantling one finds an echo of the archaeological method, - which sees the work of truth as being that of an uncovering, a scraping away of the accumulation of convention and habit that essentially blind us in order to retrieve what has become invisible. A disproportionately large number of these works – for instance, City Excavated, City Underneath, City Within, Hidden Waters, - deal with metaphors of invisibility, elaborated here both in its social and historic dimensions. The descent into history that is evoked by excavation (a recurring conceptual and visual device) becomes here an almost Borgesian quest for an absent origin, which discovers, along the way, a richly encrusted subterranean memory of the city. In a parallel move, the various contextualizations of the façade make up, among other things, a series of representations of the social face of invisibility; - it speaks of the countless lives that live behind and in its shadow, buried within the impersonal economy of the concrete jungle. At one level, these are cogent metaphors for the atomization and the reification of lives and social relationships that has become synonymous with the modern urban experience, but it could be extended, following the example of works like “Mall Alone” (a pun on “I’m all alone”) to that of a whole invisible class who have not been accounted for within its dynamic.
The mall, in whose immaculate exteriors the nation seems to have found an image of its new aspirations, exists in counterpoint to the figure of the migrant worker (as well as to the ‘historical’ city), and symbolizes one of the most ubiquitous aspects of contemporary urbanity, - the spectacle of consumption. Dilli Mall, the painting, is a jumble of motifs chosen from the various monuments in the city, piled one upon the other and held together in a strange and uneasy balance, - an ironic inversion of the archaeological mode in order to create an architectural monstrosity. There is something of the air of a curio shop or the museum about these silent structures; they are a repository of relics, an assortment of representations stuck together in a timeless stasis unmoored from their social contexts and functions. The mall also signifies the relentless logic of capital that devours without niceties of distinction everything in its way, - a point made with remarkable economy in the photographic work, ‘City Uprise’. The work is not a photomontage, but is made to look like one through the inspired trick of revealing, progressively, from the various levels on a step-well the ‘rise’ of a modern construction behind it. It is a snapshot of history’s pitiless and unstoppable momentum, showing us a picture of one world emerging on the back of another making its exit from the scene, slowly vanishing into the ground to form yet another layer of the city’s archaeological strata.
In keeping with the overall thematic and conceptual thrust of his newer work, an unusually large number of them also abound in territorial metaphors, the most frequently deployed one being the image of the wall which appears with ominous regularity across his oeuvre whenever the point needs to be particularly emphasized. Apart from the more evident sense of the motif as a marker of possession and control and as an object regulating access and containment, it is also a device that implies a schism, - a dismemberment of a whole and of the subsequent coming into being of incommensurate fragments that moreover do not add up to the original totality. This metaphor of a divide or a split is one that runs through his oeuvre, differing contextually, and pointing to various social and political divisions that have still not been adequately come to terms with, - they evoke, for instance, the psychic geography of the Hindu/Muslim relationship that is often mapped onto the body of the nation marked indelibly by its tragic birth, or in another register, the separation between the old and the new cities of Delhi that resonate with the tensions between a past configured as memory and a present working to erase the traces of its history. These concerns become clearer in a recent video made in Korea dealing with its partition titled “All About the Other Side”, in which the wall is not just an imagined divide, but exists as a material, concrete embodiment of an ideological and psychic split. While the format of the split-screen interview has become one of the most overused filmic conventions among documentary - art filmmakers, Gigi manages to coax out of it insights that unsettle our expectations, in which the responses of the more affluent citizens of Seoul overwhelmingly run contrary to any sentimental ideas regarding unification, hinging rather on an anxiety regarding the other side’s purported authoritarianism, poverty and ‘backwardness’.
One can identify, underlying the various conceptual and stylistic shifts in his work and tying them together into a coherent oeuvre, a Gandhian critique of Modernity in operation here, - of its profligate ways and its obsession with wealth and material well being, regardless of its cost in human suffering. Gandhi is himself the subject of a recent video, a series of interviews with those who knew him intimately, intercut in order to form a multilayered narrative of his life; what emerges is a warmly affectionate portrait of the man behind the image, drawing out his sagacity and generosity as well as his occasional lapses. Gandhi has a further significance here with regard to his understanding of the role of the village in the national dynamic. The village, which the Nationalist imagination consecrated as the site of its fondest aspirations and where it discovered its ‘authentic’ self, is in these works an implied presence; it constitutes not just the ‘outside’ of the city, but exists within it as well, transformed into the slum or the shanty town always on the verge of erasure. The painting titled ‘Settlement’ is a crystallization of these considerations into a single image; in the aesthetic sleight of hand that turns the bulldozer (the omnipresent deity of eviction and resettlement programs) into a habitation, we see an acerbic comment on the situation of the outsider / migrant and of his necessarily transient status as a citizen.
The ‘Gandhian turn’ in contemporary art is worth analyzing in greater detail, since it seems to have found a resonance among a wide spectrum of artists in the last few years. It could be seen as inaugurating a shift towards an ‘ethical turn’ in the arts, aided, it must be added, in no small measure by Gandhi’s own shrewd understanding of the charismatic power of images and his production of himself as a compelling icon for the masses, making him one of the most instantly recognizable figures in recent history. Furthermore, Gandhi signifies a uniquely homegrown radical politics that has the ability to be easily (and has been) and often unproblematically recuperated into the secularist theology, in light of the fact of his rejection of both leftist radicalism and the right-wing call to more atavistic impulses. The turn to Gandhi could also imply, within the discursive terrain of contemporary art a genuine anxiety about the shortcomings of the nation, - a situation that he had presciently foreseen before independence. In sum, ‘Gandhi’ today functions as a polysemic signifier of discontent, heralding a move away from the center towards the periphery in the service of an engagement not just with the exploitation involved in globalization, but also with that of the violence of the state towards those that exist along its margins. Gigi’s work can be seen in the context, within contemporary art, of a growing engagement with the forms and experiences of marginality, - social, political and cultural- and the difficult task of articulating a counter-modernity that it necessitates, which contests the destruction of minor cultures and local knowledges and tries to retrieve a diverse body of narratives that have often been buried underfoot in the long march towards progress.