Band of Outsiders
– V. Divakar

“Everything that is new is thereby, automatically, traditional” Odile translating Eliot in the class room scene.

The imperative to title this essay as “Band of Outsiders” is surely keeping in mind the famous film of Jean-Luc Godard by the same name. I am using the film’s ‘script’ as a conceptual framework for the show and am using the film itself as a script for structuring my essay. By freely taking some shots/ scenes from the film I would try to put the show in a context relevant to my propositions. Since Godard made this film on the pulp fiction based Hollywood B movies I found it as the most suitable context to write on a show which is being showcased in America. Like the characters in his film the artists in this show are in many ways outsiders other than really being

‘Non-American’! My attempt primarily would be in understanding how some of these artists belong to this category of outsiders within the legitimated contemporary art practice in India. My attempt is also to find a way to be outside the writing in the process of writing this catalogue. Since Godard freed himself from the tyranny of plot in a film by making a film with a similar plot, I would also try to free myself from the tyranny of this ritualistic writing by writing a catalogue of a similar kind.

Arthur: “How much money did she say?

Franz:   “A big pile she said”
            “May be 40 or 50 wads of bills, Could be 200 million”
            “Still I wonder why she told me” 

Godard himself didn’t pay much attention to the story which is about two boys (Arthur & Franz) who meet a girl (Odile) at the English class and learn from her that there is a cache of money in the villa where she lives with her aunt and they plan to steal it. Peculiarly Godard is not interested in the question why they are up to it. He never mentions the circumstances which led them to plan the robbery except in a dialogue where Arthur tells “it’s better to be rich and happy than poor and unhappy”. So I would also not concentrate upon the intent of the show, rather I would concentrate only on the artists works put together. Also as Franz tells that he read an American book where it tells that “Some things are best hidden in full view of everyone”, I would also not mull upon the capital interests which programmes these shows in a broader sense. I would try to investigate the linguistic traits these artists engage with, which may enable us in understanding the concepts and ideas each of the artist deal with. It seems that all of the artists have a discomfort with the reality being represented around them. There is also the possibility that even the dissent itself has been institutionalized by the respective christening forces of the market!

Might be there is also the possibility that the stakes being high in the art field, the competence is proved only by rejecting all the consumable inscriptions the surface generally carries along. ‘Here I would not digress anymore on these aspects and let the viewer/ readers decide on those for themselves.’

Franz:   If there’s nothing to say, let’s have a moment - a minute of silence.
Odile:    you can really be dumb sometimes.
Franz:   A minute of silence can be a loooooooooong time. A real minute of silence takes forever. 

Parul Dave Mukherji says in her catalogue essay on Sathyanand’s paintings “if one were to characterize contemporary Indian art by a few words, “death”, “dystopia” and “nostalgia” rush to mind. This does not preclude the playful, the aesthetic and the erotic but even the most ebullient, celebratory and ludic are refracted through the lens of unrepresentable…..”* . Also there have been genuine attempts to formulate languages which can articulate/represent the repressed in ways which doesn’t snatch the voice from the represented subjects.

Also one significant thing which has been the single thread linking many of the artists who practice in different parts of the country is their complete obsession with the complexities of urban life . The irony is that this urbanized ideology has been reproduced even in most of the leading art institutes without any amount of skepticism. It is evident by the fact that most of their pedagogical interests are still structured around the westernized colonial frameworks which largely draw back to the Neo- Classicist aesthetical sensibilities. The few art institutes which have tried to come out of this colonial legacy and their counterpart i.e., traditionalist essentialism, through individual subversions in pedagogy couldn’t but resist the strong urban cultural gaze in their art practice. Whatever much publicized re-looking has been done, has subscribed to essentialising or eroticizing the rural (subject) and thereby making it easily consumable for the market forces. Not to mention the newly emerged galleries found enough off season buyers for these traditional souvenirs. It’s a sad situation to tell that barring a few artists, contemporary Indian art/artists have not engaged with the ongoing tragedy of innumerable farmer suicides and the encroachment of state and capitalists machinery that sometimes deprives them of their livelihood. The reason may be that these ‘othered citizens’ don’t make a tasty fodder for the glitz of the media or it doesn’t fit with the international positioning of the Indian state vis-à-vis the art world.

Now having read a brief introduction to the Indian art practice in general I would like to go into more specific details of the artists showcased. I would also like to add to the observation of Parul Dave Mukherji that along with the overwhelming images of dystopia, death and nostalgia there are also very significant attempts to read the already existing spaces within art practice as “other spaces”. If one reads some of the art practice today in India in this light one might probably gather what Parul is mentioning as nostalgia and the dystopic reality are some of the failed utopian dreams. I think many artists have come to terms with the setbacks of certain ‘radical dreams’ and

have started working for options within existing spaces of galleries and the other sister/brother bodies. Many have also realized that probably there is nothing beyond credos* and everything is already within the practice only…. This is not to say that they are oedipalized completely within this holy familial structure of market. But they have certainly worked out ways where the tyrannical oedipalzing force is channelised into creative spaces of imagining possibilities.

“Franz had read of an American who took 9min45 sec to visit the Louvre. They decided to do better”

I would like to discuss the works of Vivek Vilasini in this context. On the one hand it suits the hierarchies of organizing the established facets of catalogue writing simply by the virtue of being the senior most among the artists showcased, but on the other hand this criterion alone won’t satisfy my decision to start with a description and interpretation of his work for the simple reason that his works always retain a critical edge in terms of their political engagement. Vivek has critiqued official and tyrannical ideologies with images of sarcasm and everyday pun. His photographs particularly point to the already evident carnivalesque existing in the midst of our everyday life. His famous ‘vernacular chants’, a series of photographs on popular representations of Gandhi completely destabilize the official and elite recognitions of Gandhian ideology and ridicule it with these popular versions where he is venerated even in the form of his adversaries. His other works on the reclamation sites easily question the meanings/life of these objects in our daily life. They contend by bringing ideologically opposite images like that of Buddha with an imperial eagle or a missile. These disposed reclamation sites expose the hypocrisy and the clash of ideologies in our daily lives which are often unrecognized. He consciously allows the consumption of tradition to critique larger and wider national and international issues. The images of traditional Kathakali though represent a very nativist exoticised version. Vilasini subverts these images by making them perform contemporary dilemmas and political tensions. He brings in the politics of the locale with all its polyphonic variations.

It is at this point that an artist like K.P. Reji would be very significant to understand the politics of seeing/blindness in the everyday lives*. His images of laboring people engaged in every day acts also destabilize the general notions of our visibility. The images of Reji never allow the subject to be valorized into the imagination of some Others, but they read the laboring subject in his/her position as always becoming something other than his/her assigned self. His unusual spatial delineation which includes the use of architecture actually ridicules the very system which imposes these tyrannical ordering of spaces. Moreover as Santhosh says “by partaking in the politics of everyday life they frontally refuse to produce any space for the middleclass intelligentsia to invest pity and sympathy (to the marginal) and thereby reject the blessings of their political capital.”*(Santhosh. S, The politics of everyday life)

Here I would like to talk about Kiran Subbaiah because his works have always escaped the general notions of art objects. Though working within the sphere of this legitimated art, his works/things/objects have been always questioning our intentions of predetermined viewing. By creating quasi functional absurd objects, he touches upon surrealist tendencies but moves deeper into questions of object’s being within defining structures. His works are directed at objects and, correlatively, upon “objects as they are encountered”.

Lokesh Khodke basically locates his protagonists in these middle class spaces. He similarly understands the spatial metaphor by reading the ingrained politics of caste and class from his own subjective position. He reads the contemporary situations in India by remembering the mythological casteist roots of ordering spaces in India. Benoy. P.J observes that “Lokesh’s attempt here does mark an Indian variation to the surrealist language in so far as ‘the originality of surrealism was to have recognized that a society could be founded in which revolt would be accepted as a fundamental principle”.

Further he says that “Lokesh’s attempt is original in so far as he takes recourse to the iconic aspect of Indian art to carefully subvert or work around these images”* (Benoy P.J, Beyond Apocalypse; The works of Lokesh Khodke) By reading these as ongoing projects he critiques them from within, by formally destabilizing them with absurd other existences. He brings to fore the casteist inscriptions which forcibly happen over spaces of habitation and also read these within the human body’s sensations.

Since we have touched upon the aspect of surrealism I would now like to discuss the work of Sumedh Rajendran because it questions the existing visual order by breaking the fixed hierarchies of viewing itself. He incoherently puts the fragments together in his sculptural installations breaking all singular notions of truths and thereby about existence. His works often tread the path of absurdity, mutilating organic understanding of wholeness as systematized by the order. Slipping from the definitions of a definitive form, his works often stand on the fringes of the “might be”. Sumedh’s violent sculptures are not formal surfaces of spectacles, but they portray the deep symbolic violence done by the system in the everyday subjective engagements of the subjects.

To continue on this dystopic note the works of Sathyanand’s isolated landscapes and the inhibiting half body machinations evidently bring about the metaphors of ruin and death. As Parul says “they mark a death of a personhood, subjectivity and herald a birth of a caricature, of the grotesque, of skulls and skeletons, of automata, of stultified landscapes and frozen rivers and seas.” *( Reliquary, Parul Dave Mukherji) Taking references from varied sources Sathyanand puts these personalized signs in a surface where they still remain as fragments and refer to their referents and fail /slip in their arbitrariness to give an organic completeness.

“Gigi Scaria’s particular position is to investigate how city structures, social constructs, and the view of location is translated into social prejudice and class attitude.”*(Gayatri Sinha, http://www.gigiscaria.com/writings_1.htm) Gigi has been consistently involved in various projects which attempt at seeing the varied layers of sediments and cultural recording in the urban spaces. He often refers to the famed tower of Babel and its utopic aspirations to construct a structure/complex which promised completeness but was inherently the metaphor of exclusivity and separation/definitions of space according to power.

Prajakta Potnis attempts at transforming the existent being of the objects into something else by reading the secret life of the objects. Her critique has been primarily on the ways space had been ordered in the system. The flimsy binaries of inside outside and other clichés of ordering had been brought down in her installations and sculptures. By creating very pleasing surfaces which are haunting beneath, she questions the general tendency of the middle class viewing which always expects a pleasant and problemless viewing. Her earlier preoccupation was in revealing/ unearthing the real nature of innocent looking objects and practices like gifts, trophies and prizes. At a more subjective level she says her works “exist between the subjective and the objective worlds ( the relationship between the personal and the material) so for me more than a balancing act, it has been about how these two can be depicted at the same time”*(Interview with Anoop Panicker,Soft spoken)

Lavanya Mani’s use of cloth, craft and allied techniques relegated as non art helps her in positioning herself within the dialectics of language where her primary critique has been the colonial ways of seeing, documenting and representing the East. By reading the layers of inscriptions/representations of the colonial past, she creates a palimpsest of images layered with differing and contradictory spatial and temporal viewpoints. “Lavanya does not aim to see her work as the logical conclusion of a historical process. Her attitude to the history of representation is at best navigational, and her artistic process is closer to commentary than interpretation. The success of her images does not depend on stylistic assimilations [an interpretative process], for they do not follow a genealogy of image making. Her images rather precede her chosen genealogy, reversing the route of disseminations, and as a result she helps us see the past without suspending us from the present. It is this projective quality that makes her work so interesting; they work as independent supplements to the already existing archive of the Empire.”* (Parvez Kabir, History Reserved, History Reversed: the works of Lavanya Mani, Art Concerns)

Here I would again digress a bit and try to remember the famous dance sequence of the film. Since the list of artists kept increasing in due course of the writing I would like to remember the sequence because it also was a sensitively wonderful addition to the overall objective length of the film. 

Rakhi Peswani also uses craft and sewing to talk about the self as something fragmented by the onslaught of the informational excess of today. She tries to cohere herself by relating to the process of the craft, sewing etc to find a space of her vision and existence within the overall linguistically cryptic world. She weaves simple texts which question the general nomenclature of these words and unstabilize the meanings by playing around with the varied layers and leaving the material knots open for rethinking.

Ashutosh Bharadwaj uses a detaching technique to avoid his subjectivity intervene in the clichéd mediatic images bombarded on us. His primary attempt has been to expose the artificiality of the simulations by maintaining their character as such as they are received. By creating abstract geometrically accurate designs/spaces and by juxtaposing these mediatic images in their foreground, he generally creates a tension in the act of viewing and thereby questions the claim for authenticity.

Abir Karmakar uses traditional oil techniques of the earlier masters to bring in a peculiar critique about modernity and its thrust on objectivity. One can say he is in a search for a subjective dialogue with his viewer, but never allows them the space to occupy that position. By seducing through his material surfaces and the titillating flesh he teases his viewer as Donald Kuspit quotes Fairbairn and says “Karmakar’s body, then frustrates our desire in the act of arousing it: Karmakar’s work is a tease, more particularly what the British psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn calls an “exciting object”- an object that promises pleasure but doesn’t deliver.”

Balaji often uses the popular linguistic signs to comment on the issues at large in society. By using text as a very significant element he pokes at grave and strict codes of authority. For quite sometime his preoccupation was with regard to the nation and its contemporary representations. His pun seems casual on the layers for their simplicity of direct reference but actually it refers the popu- lar/ list ideologies in circulation.

Remen Chopra’s overlapping canvases bring-in the multiplicity of voices in a simultaneous plane. By thus constructing these cacophonous voices of the multi layered figures on a single plane she offers a simultaneous viewing of these varied views. This is how she tries to break the hierarchies of the act of viewing itself.

Sunoj D’s concerns were largely shaped within the politics of identity and the locale. By portraying himself as a subject of the overarching ideologies and systems he tries to question the systemic disciplining of individuals as subjects or as an indexical number in the bureaucratic coding technicalities.

Ved Gupta attempts through his dwarfed figures, a critique on the crippled bourgeoisie in India. I would also read the figure type of this contemporary fair dwarf bellied bourgeoisie resembling the traditional gods of wealth venerated by the business class in the subcontinent. His comments are

verbal and direct to the bourgeoisie who consume everything at their face value.

In talking about the works of Arun Kumar H. G. Anshuman says “All the surfaces are very attractive indeed. His images and their innate critiques are in a state of postponement when one first encounters them. Some of these object/ signs don’t move, literally and metaphorically, as some others do- producing a whirr in the ears, while watching even the apparently innocuous compositions.”

(Materiality of the signs: The medley of public images- Anshuman Dasgupta)

“Prajakta Palav Aher paints every detail from a multitude of photographic references that she has archived over the years. The candid medium of photography allows her to unpretentiously penetrate the many aspects of middle class life in India, and capture its varied truths. Although the artist’s portrayals are realistic, they do not come across as documentaries but instead, allow the viewer to realize the disposition of the situations, and find humor in them.”* (http://www.saffronart.com/artist/artistprofile. aspx?artistid=2204&a=Prajakta%20%20Palav%20Aher)

“In 9 min 43 sec Arthur, Odile and Franz broke the record set by Jimmy Johnson of San Francisco”- Goddard narrating the Louvre run.

‘Post Script on recent works’

Or

“We now might open a parenthesis on Odile’s, Franz’s and Arthur’s feelings...but it’s all pretty clear. So we close our parenthesis and let the images speak.”

Since due to various technical circumstances as it happens in any plot and there is a delay, I would quickly glance upon the works as they had arrived. Here again I would try to remember the ‘significant scene’ which had added to the progression of the film tremendously where Franz and Arthur wait for Odile behind the factory reading the news papers.

Franz: [Reading the newspaper to Arthur] She treated me like a butler, said the lumberjack, husband of the vanished countess. The police think its murder, but Roger says ‘It’s an elopement.’ Futile search in bedroom slippers.

K.P. Reji’s consistent attempt to bring the politics of our vision which is ideologically tuned/ normalized to neglect and understand the subjective positions of ordinary laboring people finds a poetic scene of love which is materially grounded in the routinal functions of the laboring people.

Sathyanand’s set of photographic prints goes back to the basics of photographic definitions as a technique of drawing with light. He allows/ controls the camera to be exposed to the light for a few seconds so that a drawing by itself is created. Sumedh continues his engagement by adding and supplementing his figures with unusual other objects but from the same culture and brings an absurd sense of engrossment in the figures. Lavanya Mani and Rakhi Peswani weave in different contexts, the stages of subject formation in their different selves. Prajakta Palav continues her photography based realistic engagement by painting a night scene which blurs reality and simulation. Arun Kumar H. G. interestingly brings the urban colonization of landscapes, like wise Sunoj’s urbanized ecological concerns are sarcastic about our practices of daily life. Ashutosh’s ‘Building Bodies’ brings forth the way bodies get already inscribed even before they are built or they take birth by the various ideologies in circulation. Balaji takes on the bureaucratic political tyranny and tries to see the possibility of protest through the simple act of natural objection in everyday activities of the subjects. The other work “this land belongs to..” is a take on the maddening craze over ownership of land and property. With land being the most reliable source of investment nowadays the race to colonize land and acquire ownership has become the norm of every middleclass dream of growing higher up in the class ladder. Remen Chopra continues to engage with her self through the multilayered surfaces where the different voices are given space to speak out. Abir Karmakar camouflages the male body in the wall paper designs, making apparent the hidden homoerotic fantasies in the interiors of the self. He designs them as wallpapers and thereby metaphorising alienation within the self and the modern spaces of existence. Lokesh Khodke reads the politics behind the normalization of beings and the stories/ histories of abnormalcy. By re-presenting the other genders he reads the story of their confiscated memories. Vivek Vilasini parades the Kathakali figures in the Western urban landscape. His subversion lies in the actors performance of the famous painting Blind Leading Blind by Bruegel.

Odile: “Think Mr. Stolz would call the police?”
Franz: “Not likely, he stole the money from the Government”

Since the Oedipalizing systemic necessities often try to homogenize the differences which actually nullify resistances by equally promoting passive acceptances on the same plane, there needs to be new ways to counter such attempts. Probably as quoted earlier *
(probably there is nothing beyond credos, Santosh S.) these possibilities lie already within the existing practices and only a carnivalesque reading of these traditional practices themselves could make any text as heteroglossia, thereby contending the official voices with the multitudes of minor voices in every possible manner.

Franz: “isn’t it strange how people never form a whole?”
Odile: “In what way?”

Franz: “They never come together. They remain separate. Each goes his own way, distrustful and tragic. Even when they are together in big buildings or in the street”

And probably in some group endeavors too….

“My story ends here, like in a ‘catalogue’, at that superb moment when nothing weakens, nothing wears away, and nothing wanes.”- Goddard promising to continue the sequel….

The author would like to thank Rollie Mukherjee, Santhosh Sadanand and Joshil for their suggestions and help in editing the writing.

V. Divakar is a freelance writer on arts and films. He completed his master’s in art criticism from M.S. University, Vadodara, and was working as a visiting faculty for art history in Bengaluru University visual arts department. Currently he is working on a curatorial project on the visual representations of the resistances/reactions of the farming community to the state inflicted tragedy of “suicides” and other agrarian issues