theblackyellowarrow.blogspot.com wrote:
Jun. 13th, 2008 06:17 am (UTC)
ethics and art
hi inder,his is to formally share by my extreme discomfort in the manner 'Mochi-ki-Dukan, ART AUCTION in support of Suraj & his family' was conceived and executed. more so because you said (in a private conversation) that since this work was towards charity, it should not be criticized. in that case inder no ngo will be up for critical scrutiny. among many at pallete that day i saw extreme discomfort on the faces of suraj and his wife as they were glared at and introduced in an alien st up. this is some thing you have refused to recognize, and i dont blame you cause you never ever bother to look at them.
your project would have been stronger if either you had the artistic capacity to take us there..to their house. serve chai, samosa and get us to spend. it might be even stronger if you had done a photography workshop with the family, and sold their prints to raise money form them. but such long involved process is not the nature of your work.what you did amounted to treating them like beggars. you made them into beggars.in the city's performance art circuit you are a stalwart. works of far greater merit are expected from you. specially since the platform was so large.if you indeed want to work with the public, i suggest you read Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art, edited by Suzanne Lacy.
regards
Thursday, June 12
Monday, June 9
Re thinking the curation: Can Be Done In Any Corner You Like
Sometime during Shantanu Lodhs performance in front of the ‘british high commission’, and a conversation with Pratul Dash, certain conceptual loopholes in the project came to the fore, and it became clear that the curation had to be re thought and re positioned. One of the very important critiques that surfaced was that a curation coming from a reading of how the growing appropriation within the visual arts discourse had affected the concept metaphor called performance art; especially at a point when the visual art discourse in India is being swept over by the neo lib idea of the spectacle and this is having a profound impact on how an event as a marketing tool is being understood and practiced. Nonetheless the mode in which the curation was conceived was a three day event. Everything said and done the fundamental structural mistake happened there. 'Can Be Done in Any Corner you Like' went on to emphasize the dominant understand of curation as an event generating field rather than a discourse generating arena. If one had to allow for this criticism to shape the future of this curatorial project, then the project had to be re thought…re worked.
‘Can Be Done In Any Corner you Like’ is now positioned as an ongoing curatorial space which works at two levels. The blog (Can It Be Done in Any Corner You Like?), is positioned as a space for proposing and ideating, and also as the domain through which the documentation of the performances is shared and the text generates as the discursive context in which the documentation is embedded.
Planned, sporadic bursts of extensive poster campaign will be used to open up the project in terms of artists and viewers. There will no longer be an invited list of artists, instead the project offers itself as an curatorial platform for anyone who wants to do performance in non institutional/unprotected spaces in the re thinking the discourse. The project continues to be based in the imagined city of Delhi.
A formalized three member team is being put in place which maintains the blog, interacts with artists, ideates documents and fund raises. The artists participating in the project formulate a larger body which guides and works with the team. At this point certain features of the curation have been re instated after a lot of discussions with the prospective team and artists.
This remains a curatorial experiment which seeks to explore possibilities for creating art outside institutional support and spaces. We believe that there is an array of available spaces and agencies who can make such a venture possible (or impossible) but in order to locate re-think contemporary notions of curation one needs to engage with these possibilities. At a time when the alternative has either been forsaken or appropriated the project will seek to work with non mainstream modes of propagating, distributing and supporting itself. The blog is in a way the soul of the project, a site that makes the project completely transparent in terms of ideating, organizing funds and spending. The project itself will walk on the edge of being and not being an institution in a search to know whether such a space is yet possible.
There is a strong realization that contemporary culture supports a wide array of performance practices, and as we work with wider array of artists the focus should not be on the end product, the performance itself. Curatorially a deeper engagement with process is important. The failure of a performance to happen (either through negotiations within the site falling apart or due to ideological disagreements), is not a cause of lament if the process is documented and transparent.
In the spirit of de personalising this project and slowly handing it over to a team, the blog ulr has been changed fromhttp://www.ganjabengali.blogspot.com/ to www.theblackyellowarrow.blogspot.com , and the design of the blog has been completely re thought. The blog is the forum for random thoughts, demented mind and anyone interested in alternative curatorial and artistic practice. Short notes, large comments, essays cross posting are welcome. There are no administrative rights as such, who ever wants can come in and change things around.
Vibha's work
last time one ideated with vibha, she had a very clear idea of what she wanted to do. her work is theorised, but as an artist she is yet to find confidence in using her body as an medium of expression. she has been on the edge for sometime now
Mithu Sen's performance
the first letter
the second letter
these two letters (they enlarge and become readable if you click on them) summaries our attempts to put in place Mithu sens performance at the india gate. in between mithu and i had an exchange regarding police permissions vis-a-vis on site negotiations.
learnt (much later) that, the permission was denied the second time around cause 1st may was considered way too much a sensitive day.
need to follow this up urgently.
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