Review

L-machines: Notes on a curatorial experience

The very process of curating a show is a creative work, but which gets documented hardly ever. Here, Kavitha Balakrishnan, who curated ‘L-machines,’ at Gallery OED, Kochi is recounting her ‘curatorial experiences,’ and the process through which the show evolved, with her own notes and quotes from the communication with artists.

At the end of ‘L-machines’ curated by me at Gallery OED, Kochi, during November 7 - 24, here are some notes I made on, what one can call it ‘a curatorial experience!’

There are ‘n’ numbers of ways of seeing and so is of making sense, i.e. curating. This is how I practically looked at the venture, to begin with:

Started with the basic enquiries thus:

How does the world transgress gendered sexuality to invent new ways for conveying ‘erotic being ?’
What are the hurdles in front of a new found thrust for inventing or restructuring ‘erotic being’ or ‘the pleasurable selves’ for a political participation with the world?
What are the particular interfaces of art and politics outside the general parameters of the art world today generating new languages that largely tends to be pornographic, yet potentially aesthetic?

Titled the show at first as ‘Love-Machines.’ ‘Love’ was not ‘the theme’; it was more an act of correlations one can find in artistic practices. It was supposed as a working model, a cliché for artists to begin with. Cliché articulates the broken cleavages of the system very well. The idea and experience of love is tightly connected with Gendered sexuality. It is all about stereotyping, a drill of experiencing body and mind separately.

‘Concept note’ or a working idea

Something seems to be escaping from life - leaving us lame, loony and lonely - either fly from the matter – or reduce the matter. Both ways, it is a state of reduction imposed primarily by a humiliation of body. Who is there escaping from me and my matter?

‘L-machines’ is all about working with matter and materials of body in contemporary art with notions of ‘pleasure’ and ‘erotic being.’

There is a perennial ‘other-ing’ process in histories of human experience of senses, the division between mind and matter, body and spirit, man and woman, I and you. In a way it looks useful. It seems systematically devised to make authentic sense and control of our emotions, desires and carnal pleasures that are subjected to both glorification and condemnation in single uneasy breath. ‘Body’ is constantly subjected to systematic objectification and this puts ‘mind’ in the abysses of guilt and frustration so that there establishes an apparent state of void with no dialogues and imagination that can be communicated between the body and the mind without discomforting or alienating each other. This is simultaneously looked upon as ‘ultimate freedom’ and as ‘pathological condition’. Tendency towards the genre of ‘harlot-graphic’(1) is a by-product of these constant double takes. Any mystical framework of holistic union of body and mind becomes inapplicable and merely rhetorical, even moralistic in such situation of constantly reproducing polarities.

Then how to transcend this ‘othering’ process to make life really alive is a complex issue of man and woman (or ‘mind’ and ‘body’) alike. Yet it is more revealing when the split-off feminine fragment of the cultural psychological life of humanity is particularly investigating this condition and its ‘harlot-graphics’ straight away. Some energetic minds are doing this in contemporary art. This is a show to bring a few of them selectively together.

So this show explores subtle utterances and graphic nuances of carnal desires that can be articulated by some potential artists among us who are in their own ways sensitive to and can take cues from the broken order of the benign other.

This is unlike the one-sided (‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’) dream of distance, departure and escape from carnal matter/body. So much so that these artists share some sort of ‘non-place of language’ (in a sense of ‘heterotopias’ as proposed by Foucault in ‘The Order of Things’) as and when they crisscross those strictly preserved borders, materials and ideas for getting oneself ‘pleasurable’ as either domesticated or abandoned (and often obscured) or power steered / ‘pornographic’ beings.

‘L-machines’ is my on-going proposal to work on the political implications of bodily parts-of-speech in contemporary art.

Some notes:

Among many things, curation appeared to me to be a speculative task. Because there are reasons of artistic co-relations one works upon one’s familiarity and connection with artist’s works. Artists do like to work on an idea if that is an inherent part of their practice. But the artists can be busy, hesitant or may need clarification also. Things could perhaps be clarified. But things develop as one could get possible group of one’s passion. One may lose some artists for various practical reasons. One may discover somebody on the way. So the list inevitably alters. And one sits amazed.

Then it is quite exciting because one witnesses what all strange routes artists take and run their search upon the premises you charted out. There are demands. There are ‘help mails’ and ‘catch up’ mails one prepares within one’s own limitations of everyday.

....now, to give you the context why I am looking for such reference for my work....

Vidya Kamat seemed to be investigating the thread of devotion religion and pornography. As a scholar in comparative mythology, it was not unlike of her to search for rituals in some Kerala temples of goddesses where women take part in frenzy and sing love songs, almost bubbling with orgies in praise of the Goddess. She enquires for specific pornographic ritual songs. It is easy to get videos and audios of the ritual songs. But more interestingly, we found parodies of them in ‘youtube’ where young men form informal gatherings and sing the same songs in crude settings of male fantasies and pleasures. More telling was the total absence of any young women community exposing themselves in this manner taking up these orgasmic songs for a peer pleasure.

The idea of a sound installation was then fantastic. We both lived it for sometime. But it vanished gradually for no reasons. Vidya might take it up sometime if she feels like.

.......I am fit and fine, and hope you too.. my work is going on..planning to display some installation works with paintings.............

Piyali Ghosh kept responding with her updates of the solo show in the meanwhile and the way she is working for ‘L-machines.’

...“You know today I made a little bird....whose stomach is coming out. He is looking very calm even with a drop of blood oozing from its beak. But when I make an image against a white surface they start fighting. Both are like my children. I don’t know whom to support”...

Mithu Sen’s art practice is an open play that incessantly maps feelings, perceiving the body as ‘being in a certain way’. ‘Feeling’ as she works out is extremely elusive so that it is not a collection of thoughts or ideas labelled in systemic discourses where often mind is the sole boss/loss of body. The perceived stereotypes of mind are not evoked or even parodied to resist, masquerade or contest with, in Mithu Sen’s practice (2).

... Still wondering what to do for your show. Have some vague ideas but not too sure how it will pan out. Sexuality is not an easy subject to portray especially in a culture that is as hypocritical about it as ours....

Nandini Valli sent some test photographs. I was amazed at the language of the photograph. A friend, not strictly from the art world who happened to see this by chance, exclaimed that it looked like an advertisement photograph, “it is a light subject for an art work, isn’t it?” Taking one more breath he said to himself, ‘no, it is not. It looks strange to see a woman’s back like this.’ However, I wrote her back thus ‘parodying sexual hypocrisy to reveal it in a witty ‘lightening’ process – will still be a viable option to address sexuality matters.’

Yes. I had started smelling Nandini’s wit and work as it took off. I looked again and again on those flowers and hair-dos. Some are curly some knotted and some clipped. I gaped at these details like any voyeur. But then, it is also that flowers, jasmine or champa and others are ambiguous signs of ‘female habit’, traditional imposition on femininity. But it is objects of erotics hushed on our hair-do! The strangely living erotics of things so ‘conventional!’

Over there, from the erotica of ritual songs, Vidya Kamat started pushing herself to a different location, the kitchen-life. I guessed it is going to be an emotion-scape of a cook/woman/homemaker/thinker/speaker/arbitrator all in one single pursuit of an ideal curry ! I waited in excitement for my friend to crack visuals with the mustard seeds...Like a musician, our ‘video eyes’ and ‘video ears’ can repeat and recapture the rhythms. But like a music video, all music can get interrupted by uneven and fragmented dialogues

“My interest is in finding associations between what may seem dissimilar to normal vision and intellect at first. However, with deeper contemplation and analysis the dissimilar becomes similar and gets engulfed into a new formation and design which for me is my new unique discovery that I call my work.”

I look at Simrin Mehra Agarwal as an industrious researcher of pictorial motifs of the past and present. The amalgamation in her works is distinct. The transformation thereof is the most erotic in the sense that it causes a timeless excitement and newness.

......I am sending you images of my drawings around which i am building my works.These drawing are done on acid free paper (size 14"x20"). (image 8 is a reference image). At the moment i am just sending you images for you to read them independently.....

I found Shruti Mahajan at quite a late point. But her drawings sent in a month conveyed a tasteful attitude to certain pathological conditions, like bedridden state etc. That is the time we turn to body more sharply and sensitively it seems. Her images are elusive than expressive. Her attitude is more aesthetic than analytical or provocative. Her cool takes on the concept struck at the ways in which one transcends sexuality into the realities and metaphors of pain and well-being. What can a massage do on a body ? Warming the body is another experience. Like Simrin Mehra Agarwal, Shruti Mahajan also started conveying a transitory realm of senses where gender and assumed political states of self had nothing to do.

....For me to work on this assignment is both easy and difficult. Its like having conversations with you while we travel to a destination and suddenly we have a lot of things common to talk about. At the same time there are these phases of silence where I am thinking struggling within my self to watch my ideas fall apart before they again get together to become something that I can articulate. Such is the process of making art I guess. From the day one when I read your note I feel I have grown thinking about love machines where both my interpretation and outlook has changed. I used drawing as an essential tool to reflect upon this change.....

The works for the show:

Mithu Sen’s water colour continued to suspend the idea of pink love. I felt that the pink rose projects of love was here eaten up.

Vidya Kamat sent the video called ‘All you need is love.’ Speaking palms in shreds and patches ! A silent looped video. It moved in the dark area prepared in the gallery. The brightness of a pious palm caught in multiple actions was blown up on the wall.

Nandini Valli worked out four photographs with flowers and women.

Anna Bhushan, being an accomplished illustrator who specifies as working in gouache, sent works which have a deceitful simplicity. Her drawings thematically depended on the metaphors of essential feminine nature. But the diminutive graphic treatment of it is so demanding for a viewer’s eyes. She is hiding events and stories in layers after layers of translucent colour.

Shruti Mahajan’s strange glass equipment came. It had a tight neck. But inside the glass body, there were glass organs. Almost like a digestive system. Like a body that houses organs that further house more intricate micro-organisms, the work was placed on a table.

Piyali Ghosh is the artist who tended to take the typical pornographic cues in the concept of this show. She seemed to have worked up the idea of kiss - shit -lips – slimy – gluttony

Simrin Mehra Agarwal sent me work titled as ‘the origin of the sin.’ Through the ancient cupids apocalyptic visions (almost ‘William Blake –ian’ in spirit), warrior heroes and doorway creatures she created a design of friction and foliage, that I read as a creak of pleasures that ‘sin’-images of body and senses only gives.

Machinist visions:

‘L-machines’ turned all about assemblages and connections. Parts of machine functions when it comes connected with another parts of a (human) machine. All connections will not work. There are chances to transform machinist entities because it is all about re-alignment in connectivity. Without sensing the connections one will not recognise the Deluzian ‘machinist’ existence. Gendered sexuality is a connectivity that could be twisted and differently aligned for enlivening the dead cells of the organism of love, human interaction.

When the show started, I was brooding over the whole interactions happened over the last few months. Definitely, all the artists worked in quite individual moulds. All of them travelled across cliché to show the freshness of vision where in one lives senses. One lives body there. One lives through bodily parts of speech.

But there were terrible losses of dreams on the way too.

Practicing in an art gallery is like practicing in a territory? Even if one comes from cross-bred neighbourhood tastes, finding a viable means to function them in this particular machinery of aesthetics is a different thing. I expected smells to work here. I expected sounds to work here. But yes. Everything worked in this show as an aesthetic language of contemporary class.

In spite of the title of the concept being quite ‘pornographic,’ the show never touched the ‘pornographic being’ for reasons I am yet searching for. Artists in this show worked it out in a purified space, while out there, in February when we were all communicating the concept across, interestingly in India there was a landmark political campaign on love, something so called as ‘pink chaddy’ campaign. That was a territory of activism against gender that projected an irreverent woman-self that is pretty much active in India today. A message board of a campaigner told thus:

Love crosses all barriers!

Love knows no caste nor class!

Love has no religion nor region!

Love sees no gender nor sexuality!(3)

That is another territory of practicing life and expressing transgressing realities?

Transcending the gendered sexuality was communicated strongly as an artistic process and a lived reality by all the artists in ‘L-machines.’ But the practical territories of art gallery and the everyday world are preserved for no reasons by this show.

So, L-machines can continue with re-oriented aims.

Notes:

1. According to dictionary.com, The word harlot nowadays refers to a particular kind of woman, but interestingly it used to refer to a particular kind of man. The word is first recorded in English in a work written around the beginning of the 13th century, meaning "a man of no fixed occupation, vagabond, beggar," and soon afterwards meant "male lecher." Already in the 14th century it appears as a deprecatory word for a woman, though exactly how this meaning developed from the male sense is not clear. For a time the word could also refer to a juggler or jester of either sex, but by the close of the 17th Century its usage referring to males had disappeared.

2. http://artconcerns.net/2009May/html/upclose.htm I wrote this ‘Up Close and Personal’ essay on Mithu Sen’s trajectory while the communications on ‘L- machines’ was going on side by side.

3. http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/commons-law/2009-February/002991.html. this is an excerpt from a message.

(Kavitha Balakrishnan is a poet, curator and bi-lingual writer on contemporary Indian Art. She holds an M.A. (Fine) Art History from M.S.University, Baroda and her PhD thesis on the practice of magazine illustrations in the context of literate-media sensibility of 20th Century India. Currently she is the Faculty in Art History at Govt. College of Fine Arts, Thrissur. Email: balakrishnan.kavitha@gmail.com )