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Of
Human Endeavor:
The
Super Exposed City and the New Possibilities of Space
An
essay on the corporeal experience of the contemporary metropolis
in Pooja Iranna’s art
Like Pooja Iranna, I belong to the city of New Delhi, a city that
has transformed so rapidly in the last few years that we the
residents are left bemused at its expanding scale and baffled at
the implications of this rapid urban metamorphosis – from a
post-Independent refugee Capital city defining and shaping the
modern nation to becoming one of the key stations in the
Post-global economic and political network. It is in this context
that I feel compelled to read Pooja’s work, and it is to this
nexus that I feel she contributes most as an urban artist.
Pooja’s art has made slight visual shifts every few years since
she began working after graduating from the College of Art, New
Delhi in 1995 but she has remained true to her inspirational
precedents – built urban structures, how they order and articulate
space and the response of the human body and the human psyche to
these spaces.
The
particular brand of her visual language has existed in the blurred
boundaries between painting, photography, mixed media collages and
sculptures and between architecture, urban spatiality and
abstraction. But it is my belief that it is this very interstitial
nature of her work that opens up a set of dialogues on
contemporary habitats rarely embarked upon, except in terms of
ecological activism. There in nothing in Pooja’s work that
discusses the ‘peri-urban’ phenomenon, the place where the city
and the countryside meet, where the natural and the manmade clash.
Nor does it talk of architecture as dwelling, thus referring to
the built structures as habitats. If at all, it is the very
opposite of this particular dialectic of space as ‘lived’ that
helps us initiate a conversation about how we can think about our
lives lived in bounding metropolises and among towering and
omnipresent buildings.
Of
particular reference are the photographic works (Reflective
Energies I & II, Converging/Segregating I, II &
III, all 2008) from Pooja’s oeuvre, digitally manipulated,
often mirror images of photographs of buildings and other built
structures, like bridges, taken by the artist. Rather then
carrying the burden of too close a cultural or geographic
reference, these images identify a certain characteristic of
contemporary structures: to fulfill a potent symbolic function
reflecting the ideology of ‘newness’, or if you like, radical and
forward-looking development.
When looking at the photographic works we are aware firstly of the
soaring access, of spatiality articulated as a spectacle. This
free movement is aided but also ordered by the architectural
elements, creating frames which are patterned by grids, reducing
the magnificence to the manageable. What they are are present day
high-rises, headquarters of Multinational Corporations, Banks or
World Agencies, shiny glass clad buildings that belong to no-place
and can be seen in every-place. But what they have become in
Pooja’s work are radical architecture, emptying space of time and
event thus creating a shock of absolute fragmentation and
dislocation.
A
striking feature of Pooja’s work is the lack of human presence. It
begs the question, what are the social and cultural implications
when the act of building monuments overpowers the actors
themselves, when these structures are devoid of utility and take
on an existence much larger, much more monumental then the
humble-ness of the lived or occupied space? They surpass even the
discourse of design and become monstrous in their ability to pass
over the one aspect of architecture that makes it relatable, its
absolute necessary relationship with the human body. Our
occupation of space is not quantifiable or abstract but very
material and culturally specific: gestures, habits, performances,
residue-leaving practices, poetic/political discourse/collective
imagination, commemoration, everyday practices, spectacles,
ceremonies, and the like... can Pooja help us come up with an
understanding of spatial(izing) art and lived practices?
How
do we then respond to this deflection of relatability if not
attempt to fill the space with emotions, thoughts and desires,
when our body is too limited, too small for the challenge? Her
work flies in the face of the dictum that ‘all really inhabited
space bears the essence of the notion of home’ (Bachelard, Poetics
of Space). And yet her art is an articulation of the essence of
the phenomenological experience. It brings to mind Charles
Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin's concept of the flaneur, a
city-wanderer who experiences the city through walking without
being recognized, with a freedom one would not find in rural
settlements. For urban living is very intimate (spatial
proximities of modern housing and work areas) and very distant
(social distance of anonymous existences) at the same time.
Pooja’s art is preoccupied with the urban environment as the
location for this experience. She experiences space through her
senses, thus we get, in Henri Lefebvre’s words, “not texts but
texture”. While we can still identify the physical precedents of
the photographic works it is in her paintings Apex/ Base I
& II that we experience the ultimate sense of nothingness,
a space then filled with immense possibilities. There is still the
articulation of three dimensionality but it is a visualization of
intangible ideas, of emotions and of individual experiences. It is
in this aspect that one sees the poetry in the austerity of
Pooja’s visual language, her limited palette and the spaces she
creates, spaces which are alien and isolating and also, in a weird
way, inviting, encouraging your thoughts to soar high, glide along
the smooth planes or settle in the nooks and crannies. We not only
create and transform architectural spaces, but we also produce
stories, myths, imaginations about them. These spatial
imaginations can not be dissociated from the material corpus of
the city.
It
is not so implausible to consider poetry, architecture and art
together, for their interest with form, their use of meter or
structure, and their stance toward their environments. They
involve our perception and how that perception is translated into
a created, or built, environment. Pooja inserts into this
triangulation us human beings, the creators and receptors of such
activities. The human presence is not the central visual character
of her work but present more in essence, a viewer whose awareness
of self is heightened by the lack of others. I may not be present
in Pooja’s art but it has been made with the knowledge of me.
Miniscule Monumentality: Pooja’s New Sculptural Exploration
The
fascinating new development in the current body of work are the
intricate sculptures made by the artist using staples. Resembling
building models they cleverly replicate many of the ideas in the
digital works and paintings but also the formal aspects of
composition, colour and form. The vast expanse of Confluence I,
the complex geography of the pyramid in Convergence/
Segregating I and the lyricism and precision of Confluence
II are astounding. They give some indication of the unique
vision with which Pooja sees the world, as a collection of
abstractions that fit together, as a digital design but also as a
‘new nature’ that is defined by us and in return defines us.
Her
play with scale from the vast to the miniscule, an aspect that has
been a part of her creative process from the start, is worked to
perfection in these sculptures. Though this is not the first time
Pooja has made sculptures, in 2006 she made Standing Strong
where she laminated digital prints onto boxes and stacked them as
towers and To My Kids With Love where similar boxes formed
a grid wall it is with this work that we see the maturing of
Pooja’s style. There is none of the ad-hoc or the vainly
constructed in these staple sculptures. Their strength lies in how
they belie the fragility of their size and material and take on
the persona of a much more powerful thing, like modern
architecture - shiny, metallic and ordered. As Pooja puts it,
‘They look delicate and yet they are strong. Any strand left loose
or a frail part ignored can make the whole structure crumble and
fall apart never to be built to the same strength.’ But it is this
very aspect that the sculptures celebrate, the ‘human endeavor’
that urges us on to better what exists and to push the limits of
imagination and possibility.
In
conclusion,
the
public space appears as an architectural and identity space, one
fully open to small narratives. So then do we begin to consider
this over-equipped city around us as a new landscape, even with
the aesthetic connotations attached to this term? The city is an
environment consisting of the work of man, and this work carries
the mark of visual considerations. In fact, nothing could be more
false than to assert, as one often does, that today’s city
testifies to a total indifference with regard to form and
ambiance. On the contrary, from building fronts to billboards,
almost everything is designed and seeks to attract and seduce the
eye. The chaotic character of the large, contemporary cityscape
originates, as witnessed in Pooja’s art, more from an
over-abundance of aesthetic intentions than from their radical
absence. The artist takes pleasure in multiplying architectural
perspectives in order to mislead the spectator. This architecture
may cause anxiety due to its potentially limitless character, yet
it is the limitlessness of the constructed that also frees it, and
us, from the shackles of confinement and thus urban imprisonment.
The ever-expanding boundaries of the built space become our new
frontiers, our anxious landscapes.
Deeksha Nath
January 2009
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