(Reflections on a few evidences from Anga Northeast)
[Published in Tracing Art in Public (TAP), a web magazine and an interactive media platform for public art that explores new modalities of viewership and public participation. TAP is a live archive showcasing the plethora of public art practices in South Asia.]
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| Art History outside the Institution |
Any sort of Public Art, by condition,
inherits some characteristics of a performance. If one does not agree to call
it a Performance, at least, some performative
aspects are always there. Any art work situated in Public, or, addressed to the
public, constructs the notion of public according to its spatial and conceptual
location. There was never any absolute definition of the public out there. The
process of constructing its own audience, defining the public, the essentially
important concerns around time and space, the interactions with the
environment, the materiality, the plastic embodiment and the process of decay,
the presence and absence - all can lead our attention towards the
performativity of the existence, of the being. Likewise, a piece of Performance
Art at large, has a tendency of palpably becoming an evidence of Public Art. A
performance always seeks an audience. Even if there is no one, (say, in case of
an isolated and intimate performance art experimentation), still there is an
audience. A conceptual embodiment of a spectator is always there. That audience
is always plural and public. Again if we go back to the enquiries on why
performance as Art occurred in the history, if we put light on the fact that it
somehow tried to destroy the white cube practice of the elite aesthetics, then
also we would agree upon the fact that performance as art also tried to physically
reach out a larger audience; a public audience that consists of passerby
onlookers. Thus, performance art and public art both categories have close and
intimate relations. But as practices goes on, we have tendencies to classify
evidences and to define generic dispositions. From this point we meet some paradoxes.
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| Neibourhood |
Performance Art, the genre is intrinsically
a notorious one for its constant shift from any kind of normative definitions.
Still if one looks closely for a common feature, then perhaps it would be a
tendency of instigating a critical dialogue against the 'normative'. In that
way, by nature, Performance Art is non-confrontational, radical and
interventionist. At the same time one can say any kind of Public Art also does
the same by pulling the Art out of the white cube, by freeing it from the
historical museums and galleries and seeking for a much varied and accidental
encounters. Still there are some severe and intricate problems, some paradoxes,
and some conversed theoretical positions in interweaving the both: the public
and the performance.
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| Looking for a Public Toilet_ 2012 |
All kind of art needs a trained audience. Particularly
the performing and entertainment arts, dance, theatre, cinema, always need a
tradition: a tradition of performing as well as a tradition of spectatorship. That
is how a language gets developed and a mutually participant community of the
performers and spectators is built up. Within literature, perhaps poetry is the
medium where the search for newness or
novelty is more intense, and thus experimentation
goes vigorous. Likewise amongst the arts, in visual arts people always look for
something new. Whenever an idiom is established, very easily it tends to become
cliché within a short period of time. This is a stern point of crisis a
practicing artist may face once he or she asks the conceptual location of the
spectator. One address is always there in case of art, unlike a journal writing
or a public intellectual where the target audience is very much clear, that is,
it is always "to whom so ever it may be concerned". Debates may grow
up here onwards, as, the Performance Arts at the same time seek a wider range
of audience, invite accidental encounters in the public sphere and on the other
hand to make the communicative signs more functional it also aspect a trained
gaze of the spectator. This is a paradox because we know that it is not
possible to happen. You cannot try to reach out a 'public' outside the
art-institutional space, and aspect the public to be well 'educated' at the
same time.
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| Looking for a Public Toilet_ 2012 |
The problem of spectatorship is more
complex in Assam for the diverged linguistic, cultural, ethnographic, migratory
and political social history. The North Eastern Indian State of Assam could be
seen as a microcosm of India. The idea of a nation has been a process till now.
A social or political history could not be written in singularity. And as the
modernist History of Art in India has
its base in the colonial period, in
Assam it could not construct its own history
of art since the colonial rulers entered that land quite late. Moreover,
the social tapestry full of indigenous aboriginals was inherently reluctant
towards the modernist attitude. The rise of the middle class was a late
twentieth century phenomena. This statement was important because it is the
middle class who palpably builds concerns around nationalism, identity and
constructed methodical history as well. Even before the national identity had
gotten an apparent contour for itself, the world suffered from globalization
and open market, and the impossibility of a totalitarian superstructure was
realized. Ethnic assertion, search for a nation-state identity and coping up
with the global economy - all these three facets were ever intolerant to each
other.
Under these conditions, an artist in Guwahati,
Guwahati not as a city but a locale, tries to make a body of work in the
public. The instance, without even looking at the art work, without going to
the formal experience, immediately addresses these set of problems : to whom it
may be concerned? Whose subjectivity is
it addressing? Which set of Public? Which community?
My first encounter with Anga Northeast, a
collective made by some students and alumnae of Government College of Art and
Crafts, Guwahati was in 2012 through a public interactive venture done during
the "Regional Art, Performance and Events", R.A.P.E 2012. The
collective built up a series of public toilets with locally available natural
materials in the heart of the city Guwahati. Those makeshift toilets were
actually not for use, as they were perceived as artworks, according to the
collective's claim. No promise of permanence was there. The project was a good example to look at the
collective's attitude towards public art
for many reasons. People were curious and passerby used to visit with a
curiosity to see - what is inside. The local public and the town authorities
were astonished to see the sudden presence of those structures, as there was no
permission taken or no public announcement made beforehand to create a more
interventionist gesture. It was a project to disturb. Collecting materials,
preparing over the night and installing the makeshift toilets in the early
morning - the series of action were considered as a collective performance. In
recent years the collective continues taking up ventures systematically to
ensure their attitude towards practice in public.
Any work in public, by condition, is bound
to be an intervention. The methods, experience and gains of the intervention
become more profound over any other concerns. Anga Northeast has been executing
a new venture, an ongoing project, where the artists re create an image that
they encountered in their art classes in random found spaces. In a conversation
with the artists they stated, they tried it out of the curiosity - to see how
it could create a dialogue amongst the 'ordinary' people. Art institutions and
the artists’ community always have been isolated from the ordinary everyday of
the public life. Evidence from Goya or Vincent Van Gogh inside the classroom may
have different significance. But when it is placed in public on a different
material and surface it would embody a different set of context. It is a
process of creating a context by pulling out materials out of the context.
In
the collective's own voice,
"A
collective project intended to become the catalyst for generating multilayered
reactions, interactions and meanings in the Ganeshnagar area of Guwahati. It
aims to pull out art historical narratives towards the local and immediate
context of Ganeshnagar suburb. This painterly response towards immediate
surrounding begun with the collaboration between the local community and the
Artists of the Anga Northeast. The community is providing the multi-textured
surfaces (walls, doors, windows etc.) for the ongoing project which is making
the art historical imagery more textured, ordinary, accessible, and a thing of
everyday. In this way this collaboration is liberating the art history from its
aged context and institutionalized spaces".
Noteworthy that, Anga Northeast was formed
back in 2010 by a set of students as a revolt against the pedagogy of the Art
College.
"During
B.F.A. we, a group of student used to go outdoors for watercolor. We roam
around collectively, working together, discussing, arguing, and sharing our
thought with each others. Indeed we visited the art gallery in Assam and the
works, their practices, and the visual language cannot quench us. We were
searching for new or beyond the convention. We realize the collective power
which unconsciously emerged in between us; also we called as a group or water
color group or discussion group. Apart from this, in the academic structure we
didn’t get enough space for work; college’s studio is open for limited time,
even no space for any discussion, we did not get new things or contemporary
works attitude from our faculty or from the students"
-
an artist form Anga Northeast states.
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| Art History outside the Institution |
Anga Northeast is a collective with a
large number of young practicing artists. The associated artists collectively,
and with individual efforts are trying to intervene in the public sphere. In all the efforts they are trying to examine
the nuances of an intervention; develop the understanding of material and
surface. Not only through the formal execution of the work but also with the
process and verbal communication they are constantly creating a dialogue within
and outside. As a result, the performative gesture they adopted so far is not
limited to the ways that the Performance Art (as a piece of work) usually does.
The works and methods of Anga Northeast
stand apart from the state sponsored 'Art in Public'. They also stay away from
the idea of using art for beautification. The artists of Anga Northeast mostly
work with locally available materials and they are against the idea of
permanence. In an article written in Assamese language, long ago we stated a
few things upon the importance of performance in Assamese Artistic practice
along with the understanding of the impermanence
or the ephemeral. With a bit of
sarcasm I said, the geography and climate in Assam do not allow an artist to
think of a long lived plastic material production. If a wood-carve sculpture is
left outside, there are termites. Oil paintings are destroyed by fungus. One
cannot apply water color in the damp process on paper because the weather is so
damp that the paper takes a long time to dry up. Above the humor or sarcasm,
what we tried to do was to grab attention towards the performative artistic
devices. As we stated earlier, the lack of a plastic Art History on this land
was witnessed because the devoid of the modernist movements. But at the same
time it also should be counted that the cultural environment is also full of
thousands of rituals and other performance traditions. Instead of looking at
the Visual Art as an independent discipline, all visual experiences are to be
understood as once ore even now essentially as parts of some other cultural
practices. So, the modernist individual artist needs to look back at the
vibrant textile of the northeast, pottery and other crafts. Above all, at the
performances: at the idea of impermanence. The predominant philosophies also
said about impermanence in this land, from Buddhism through Vaishnavism:
"athira dhana-jana, athir youvana" (unstable is the property, material
and life).
While walking out of the institutional
space of Art Education and entering the
everyday institute of the public, if the artists’ collective encountered
the question of addressing and defining the ‘public’ itself, then why not using
other means of communication to understand it better? So, the artists’
collective continued other activities like going out, meeting people,
organizing a film screening to understand: the public space, the outdoor, the
site-specificity, the ordinary every day. On January 2nd, 2017,
there was a public conference as a protest against the Government’s Citizenship
Amendment Bill, co-hosted by three organizations in Guwahati - Uki, Literary
Factory and Anga Northeast at Laksmiram Baruah Sadan. The entire set up or
arrangement of the conference was intervened by installation works to disturb
the environment of a regular discussion session. This evidence reminds me when
some of these artists used to appear with a tooth brush brushing the teeth in a
press meet, and also in a theatre festival at Rabindra Bhawan during the
R.A.P.E 2012 activities. That was also an attempt to destroy the
sophistication, the monotony of a national cultural and elite environment. Here
we can remember another evidence of such intervention, interference or
re-appropriation done by an artist from the collective. Usually the campus of
the Art College is filled with life study figures done by students in the
classroom. Once the Artist placed some bamboo sticks to the genitals of those
left apart nude male figures in the campus. These evidences also inform us that
for Anga Northeast the ‘public’ is not a fixed category. At large the word
‘public’ denotes two contradictory types. One is a commonplace, mundane,
ordinary, and accessible to everybody. The other is the state buildings,
congregational halls that are public, but publicly accessible only under
certain rules and conditions. The artists’ collective is being engaged with the
both ideas of the ‘public’.
Now, what we started up with, let us talk
about the problem: the problem in bringing Performance Art to the public and in
locating the spectator or onlooker. After looking at the approaches taken by
the Anga Northeast, we shall realize that the problem actually lies in
modernist gaze: in the pedagogy, in the attempt of putting the performance in a
disciplinary normative and above all in looking at the Art and the Artist
within the modernist bracket. The young artists were suffering from the lack of
an environment where they could explore their artistic expressions and that
crisis forced them to look at the public. Then they discovered that the
art-school training and the public sphere had no intimation in actual. From the
basic trouble - 'for whom the art work is addressed to' - the 'Artist'
eventually faced the question: where is the trained spectator?
During a conversation with an artist from
Anga Northeast, who is also exploring the public sphere in recent years through
performances, the artist said about one of his dream projects. It was a Performance
Art project, and to achieve the desired goal he felt he needed some more time
to prepare: not only prepare the self
but also the desired spectators. The
idea of building up audience in context to a particular work over the period of
a time was a good and fascinating idea. It could add layers to the work
promising more involvement and more intense communication. In many performance
ventures we usually keep doing this: we try to reach out to the public through
writings, though media, and through other mediatic extensions. But again, what
exactly we are talking about by saying 'preparing' the spectatorship? If it is
about 'educating' the public, again the critique of power relation may fall
back. Also, looking back to the complexity of the social structure, the way the
'public' life is being weaved out in the land, the more profound question will
be raised there: public, but what public? Which Public?
Whose subjectivity is being sought for?
[During this writing I was in
communication with Anupam Saikia, Dharmendra Prasad, Ankan Dutta, Dhrubajit
Sarma and Bidyut Sagar, some of the members of Anga Northeast. All the views
stated here are of the writer.
Image Courtesy: Anga Northeast]
Samudra Kajal Saikia
