BEYOND THE BINARY:  ART, TRIVIA AND THE POLITICS OF INTERPRETATION

BENOY P.J

‘And if it is a despot  you would like to dethrone see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed.’

-Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet.

This show of paintings by seven  artists- Ameen Khaleel, Sunder.O, Subair.M,  Siddharthan.K, Louimari Maudet, T.R.Udayakumar and  Teppo Valkama is titled ‘Traces of journey’ and highlights a recent phase in the artistic activity of these artists. The works, taken together, can be seen as various ways of addressing the complex questions of visuality, especially those put forth by an environmentalist/ micropolitical critique of hegemony.

Ameen Khaleel works  in a subdued and minimalist style utilizing  diverse materials, objects, digital images,  video clippings etc. In the work  ‘Kanji kuzhi’ (Pit for food) he refers to the old system of serving food to dalits in pits made on the ground outside, and to the place name found in many places in Kerala (at least Alapuzha, Kottayam and Idukki districts have these) which may have come from this caste practice. The work alludes to the enforced subordinate position accorded to the lower castes and the elaborate practices of humiliation that go along with it. Ameen uses sand on drill cloth and digitally transferred images with diligence to put forward a memory from previous history, and creates a visual narrative, even while sticking on to his paired down and minimal style.

In ‘Void  vessels’ Ameen works with digitally transferred images of vessels used for domestic purposes on canvas which brings forth the memories of those vessels, baskets etc, as containers used for storing, carrying  or other day to day purposes, the images of these vessels, naturally, are as  dysfunctional as a Kosuth chair or Magritte’s pipe.

The image of a ‘Fat Patriot’ inspired by Mu Boyan, is that of the limbless torso of a plump man in his underwear. The image also reminds us of the many figures of George Grosz which depict gluttunous capitalists. While it does evoke the memory of the ideological underpinnings of nationalism, it also does take recourse to a stereotyped view about the human figure, which tends to devalue a fat torso as something removed from the ‘ideal’ one, and hence somehow unfit. This complication is also one that involves a necessity for a micro level understanding of the discourses around ‘ideal’ bodies, which are also ideological constructs, and hence deeply problematic (some of the most virulent patriots from Hitler to Golwalkar were quite lean figures.)  At the same time, patriotism itself, a phenomenon that took its present form around the  seventeenth century, is also basically based on a territorial sense, which, anybody acquainted with history would know to be transient  and  subject to periodic changes.

   In the installation Ladder-I, composed of a burned and broken ladder kept against a wall and the video clipping of a man in blue dress repeatedly climbing up and down a ladder, he attempts to act out the drama of common man’s aspirations caught up in a move  towards upward mobility and the impossibility of its realization in the present. To Ameen the everyday moves for survival are of no great significance, since they are at the best delusions of a certain kind which have no material truth. The significance of strategies for survival, while of great significance to the marginalized, appear to be betrayals for other people, though they wouldn’t be reluctant to accept whatever possibilities are offered to them in their own lives. This compulsory notion that those who are marginalized should always remain so, and that any attempt at bettering their lives have to be seen as betrayal of the collective dream is a powerful tool in the service of hegemony, since it shifts the blame for maintaining an exploitative system from the ruling classes/ castes to the moral choices of the subordinated people. It also acts to ensure that  the subordination  cannot be questioned, since a radical questioning of the legacies of oppression can only be best understood by people who have also had the opportunity to get a comprehensive knowledge about how privilege and exclusion  works at various levels in a society.   To ensure that conditions of depravity prevail constantly for the marginalized and the minorities is also a way for ensuring the maintenance of hegemony.  

The landscapes in K.Sidharthan’s paintings are ones that are undergoing many changes, often with sign’s of ongoing construction works, especially of bridges etc, and mountainous forms or huge rocks pervading the environment, paddy fields, and the like. The rocks/ mountains are sometimes ones that stand heavy and unmoving, something that stands and makes rains fall or stops the wind etc; which are also sometimes perceived as blocking the way in the construction of new bridges or the ‘view’ for a bye-stander. The ambiguities in the discourses around these varied debates unsettle the existence of the very mountain and their continued presence becomes the subject of active controversies, when environmentalism and developmentalism  lock horns in conflict.

 The heaviness and impossibility of human transactions in the highways and bye-ways of Power is the subject of many of these works. The very highways maintained for the smooth conducting of the operations of power also do create impossibilities for the articulation of the complex subordinated political subjectivities. However, as the entwined flowering of two trees indicate, there is always a flowering of the nature, in spite of all the things that block the way.

In his works in the series ‘Haunting insight’of which two are part of this show, T.R.Udayakumar works with a dialectical sensibility, attempting to look at the exploitation of mankind and nature, and the exploiters. In the first work, which is a painting in acrylic of a long piece of wood lying on a dried up river bed, one end of which is shaped into a boat, and the other end of the trunk is dead wood with huge and pretty many layered mushrooms growing on it. Five kingfishers sit perched on the central part of the trunk and various ephemera from the sea, such as shells, conches, sea anemones, starfishes etc, are strewn on the river bed. For the artist, the reshaping of the wood into a utilitarian object(boat), and its predicament as dead wood are both tragic, since the original state of it as a live and breathing presence in the environment is forsaken in both cases. The somewhat huge and ‘obscenely’ beautiul  mushroom is basically something that grows on detritus, and the presence of the many beautiful objects all around it doesn’t give it any further  embellishment. The grey, yellow ochre, black and cobalt blue colours of the restricted palette play along well with the paintings general mood. The floating milk weed (appooppan thaadi), on the other hand is a hairy wind pollinated seed, a touch of lightness and new hope(seed) in this painting. Udayan uses the image of milkweed in a similar manner in the next painting also which is the depiction of a dried up bamboo bush on which many green snakes  are to be seen, indicating a venomous , possibly animalized presence that threatens the very environment. The binary structures that give credence to many of the works in the present show, remain an important  aspect of making value- judgments and identifying opponents, organizing the visual field in these works.

Teppo Valkama’s series of untitled works (all pigment prints on canvas) are close images of various surfaces with peeling paint, marks of nails, or small holes on the surface, a door in front of which a curtain made of thick, dirty sack cloth hangs- all little facts that hang precariously between narrative and abstraction. The curtain, one may also say, maybe something that replaces a lost door, functioning at the same time as a curtain that allows passage and as a door which asks you to keep away or leave it alone, because there is no real door and the situation is fragile and difficult. These works also continue the ephemeral quality that  the works of Ameen, Louimaria  Maudet, and Subair try to explore in various ways.

The paintings of O.Sunder included in the show are done in acrylic on canvas, and are mostly done in various shades of grey except for two works titled Ammu-1 and Ammu-7, which use a more vivid palette. For the exception of one work, all the works depict  images of solitary women in various life situations. One image that stands apart in terms of the subject of the painting is that of a pigeon on top of a pillar, titled ‘Alone’ in which we see a bird sitting all alone at the top of a pillar, painted in a style close to that of a digitally manipulated photograph in shades of grey. The loneliness of the bird, however, maybe transitory and contingent, since it is simply a matter of time that it may fly off and find some company. A visual strategy that Sunder adopts in many of the works is to follow the model of a failed graphic print, where the registration of the image was not correct, so that the same image is repeated with a slightly shifted impression, a definitive strategy  to bring the notion of a generalized imprecision in assessing the significance of these women. In the work ‘She’, the second impression is totally different from the first since the image in the background maybe that of a woman, while the image in the second impression appears to be male, bringing forth an ambiguous play of gender and bio-politics.

A spate of questions are also thrown at the viewers of these works by various artists. Louimari Maudet’s works, pigment prints on canvas, which are together titled ‘cA VOUS REGARDe’ (What are you looking at?)  are images of various trivia, especially photos of torn remains of layers of posters, peeling paint, dust ,rust on images from cinema posters, wall writings, and so on. One image repeated in many of them is that of staring eye/s that may well be that of a big brother, the eye of surveillance, or one which could also be a matter of mere accident.

The artist throws a question at you, and attempts to make you aware that even trivial things of these sorts may have things to say to one who listens and observe. Many, many things, from the effects of the passage of time,  that a poster on the wall maybe hiding so many other layers of local history,  most of which had lost their initial colours and charm in the passage of time, becoming partly torn, with other posters pasted above it, disappearing, only to reappear again when the layers are torn away, as just another layer, sometimes purely insignificant, sometimes as evidence, memory etc, or just like an yearly circle on the trunk of a tree, marking the passage of time. Continuing, perhaps, the quest of  Marcel Duchamp in his work, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même), most often calledThe Large Glass (Le Grand Verre) in another context and time. Louimari Maudet’s question, then, is a necessarily contradictory one, in a sense, there is a prompting in it, that asks one to start describing or interpreting, and at the same time, it also makes fun of the onlooker’s attempt at elaboration, because you also know that the object of your gaze could well be some trivia(denotation), into which, your perception attempts to read meaning. However, the predicament of thinking of all sorts is that it always occur  within a language or system, and so the creative endeavour can at no point be reduced by discourse to that which it denotes, to the authorial intention behind the work.

I will like to elaborate further on this question with a discussion of Subair.M’s works with pigment print and acrylic on canvas with photographic images taken from the surroundings of various public and private spaces like street, market etc. In this series of works, Subair juxtaposes images of animals and birds on to the photographs of various spaces attempting to create a tension between the ‘natural’ elements and the markers of a ‘degenerate’ capitalism. The birds, bats, and cow are all engaged in acts of survival which also turn out to be acts that problematize the logic of the market  and the signs of technological progress( bats in a vegetable market, cranes in a fish market, cow eating cinema posters, crows waiting around a bio-gas plant). The alienation of the natural world from these marks of ‘progress’ where the living beings can no more collect their food from their surroundings due to the use of devices like green houses, bio gas plants that process organic waste, use of strong pesticides, and the thrust towards cleaner environs which tend to cover up all the earth’s surface, especially in cities with concrete or tiles, so that there is not much soil left for small plants or grass to grow. This crisis in the everyday acts for survival have to a large extent driven the birds and animals away from their natural means for collecting daily food and towards institutions like the market. In a broad sense, the question for Subair seems to be the articulation of a crisis in bio-politics, a politics of survival, and the decisive interventions of capital that has driven all of the natural world towards an impossible situation. Along with the predicament of other varied species, the fate of human beings also has undergone this transformation from earlier forms of agrarian life to capital intensive agricultural  production. The use of what one may call the ‘animalization trope’ in these images, and their subtle racial/caste/ gender underpinnings are interesting subtexts to this narrative of ‘bio-politics’. The increased levels of pollution of the air, water, and land has perpetuated a grave crisis with the gradual rise in temperature, spillages from nuclear waste damaging large areas permanently, the environmental consequences of the maintenance of centers of tourist and mass pilgrimage, wide use of plastic, and damaging chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides etc, and the remnants from the many wars fought all around the globe at the instigation of the Military – industrial complex, have all had most damaging consequences for earth. The works hold a somewhat cynical attitude towards these transformations and is without any considerable hope about them.

The work titled ‘No more reading’ is a somewhat crudely rendered juxtaposition of the digital image of a street where a cow is seen eating a cinema poster on the wall, standing on a pavement. The image is not exactly a photograph but a photo-montage or collage on to which the image of a cow has been painted in. It re-circulates popular imagery(Cinema posters), memory(the scene reminds one of John Abraham’s movie ‘Amma Ariyan’ where a cow is seen eating up a cinema poster at the site of a struggle.), pop criticism, certain notions of ‘bio’-politics, a problematization of ‘art criticism’ as an evaluative and discursive ensemble(the title ‘No more reading’) and so on to arrive at a somewhat innocuous and mundane visual artifact.

In the initial injunction in the title, as well as in the composition of the work is a somewhat  ‘open’ posture of rejection  of any attempt at ‘reading’ the work (which is also seen as the cows eating up of a poster for want of better food) which is seen as a threat because reading renders the artist’s attempt recognizable, thereby also bringing on political sanctions etc., or neutralizing it by taking it out of its immediate context and examining its socio-political and aesthetic ‘connotations’ within the vast repertory of visual images everywhere. This posture of rejection, one may see as an instance of what is called the ‘intentional fallacy’ at work. Subair do not attempt to render the space in a naturalistic manner (the ‘tilted’ angle at which the ‘ground’ is placed may well make the cow slide down the line), and the pavement appears to be a wall separating the cow from the earth which could provide it with nourishment, while  the standing wall has also  become one large narrative space, a screen on to which the story is projected. Since the very act of the cow is a mundane and everyday event, which is also at the same time a recirculation or regurgitation of a past political moment, a ‘citation’ as in much of academic art, which could come in for various reasons, sometimes to keep alive the memory, sometimes to tell a new tale, or maybe also to infuse the trivial event with some additional glory by making a spectacle of the ‘history’ of the gaze and the cultural capital/ connoisseurship which could discern and perceive these intricacies. It is interesting to note that the site of this ban/ taboo (the work ‘no more reading’) is, at its very inception, always already discursive, rendering the order to desist from reading altogether impossible. The ban or taboo, as elsewhere, is, more than anything else a mark made at a site of contestation, at a place where differences of opinion persist, and where the debate has so far run into a stalemate for want of better insights, or where the articulation of hegemony has forcefully made a truce ( sealing the debate which was showing potentials of overturning it) favourable to the interests of Power. Popular consciousness retains the memory of the reaching of this ‘threshold’ with the recirculation of its marker, the taboo around which the debate had stumbled or was arrested by the workings of authority. In spite of, or precisely because of this injunction, the processes of thought are always in constant circulation around this site, and the various subjectivities involved constantly trying to overcome the stalemate through fresh insights and ever new conceptual frameworks that could help move beyond the double bind.  The first ban, one should also remember, was the one that had thrown man out of the paradise, and was one initiated by corporeal and religious authority, instituting the regime of mediations between man and god, creating segregations and binary logic, hierarchy and the like. With the institution of the taboo and the binary logic within which an apriori heirarchization and opposition of conceptual categories was promulgated (good/bad, sacred/profane, pure/ impure, idea/matter, beautiful/ugly, positive/negative and so on..)  the equivalence accorded to conceptual categories and worldly actors in paradise was overturned (remember the notion of equality that shines through the instance of the story of iblis in the Koran- Iblis is the angel who had refused to bow to Adam, because he couldn’t accept the equality accorded to Adam since he was made of mud, the primary injunction being the apriori rejection of hierarchy.). The trajectories of thought that followed in the wake of the authoritarian interests underlying binary formulations could never  move beyond hierarchy because, in a binary the opposition maintained between categories was set in place to ensure the secondary status of the supplement, which was seen as incapable of becoming equivalent to the first part. There are junctures in history at which the balance of power shifts decisively and degrees of equivalence make their appearance demanding a cancellation of the binary system through a move towards more complex formulations. The notion of kaliyuga, then, is such a threshold at which the old binary order would work no more, and the society has to move on to a more complex articulation. The institutions of worldly power try in every way to avert this eventuality, which could only mean that the egalitarian paradise is about to be regained, and will want the world to go back through another loop of time, for which they violently attempt to curtail the ascendance of multivocality, the new regime of speech, and even the binary system in which there is still a place for the other, albeit in a secondary position (which has already shown its weakness and is about to be replaced by more complex structures), and go back to a system of stricter taboos and univocality (Advaita). Univocality is basically a system of pure deception(Maya) because it is a system of thought that would like to deny the very existence of thought, because thought is always and necessarily a move beyond a singularity, a move between two or more points, but the world of Power is no more ready to accommodate the binary which it had so far used because it had exhausted its utility and had already started showing signs of succumbing to a more complex conceptual and worldly system. Buddha and his sangha, on the other hand are the evidences of the ascendance and existence of such a new regime, a regime in which everybody can attain their endarkenment(project of common good), a move beyond good and evil, not exactly Neitzche’s, since it was still premised on the binary formulation of materialism/idealism and had to inevitably give way to nihilism, but of a Buddhist variety as seen in the Dhammapada:

”If your mind is not troubled,

If your thought is not perturbed,

If you have left behind good and evil,

Wakeful, you will have no fear.”

The micro level contestations which such an epochal mobilization could have initiated, which would render all authority contestable, then, one may say, is the threshold of/to the paradise, the land without taboos, without criminals, the land of equality, freedom and the profound equivalence that rests on God. Maveli nadu, was one such paradise, which could not be suppressed by Power, and had become a space of infinite grace.