Untitled: a show on the boundaries

Artists: Vidya Kamat and Sharmila Samant
March 20, 2004 | 5.00 pm
The Asiatic Society, Mumbai

One of the most interesting critical turns in the practice of art in recent times has been the negotiation of the gallery-space. While artists have tried to use the conventional gallery-space in innovative ways, art is simultaneously getting displaced out of traditional museum and gallery spaces into the domain of the public sphere. The displacement has allowed for the possibility to present art, not just to a pre-determined ‘viewer’ i.e. the gallery-goer, but to a wider cross-section of the public (which might otherwise have been a passive or disinterested segment). This displacement implicitly involves, in varying degrees, the viewer and the artist in a dynamic relationship depending on the medium and the site that the artist may choose for the intervention. While within the context of art history and criticism, the contemporary movement of art into the public space is located around the collapsing of categories of ‘high/low’ art and ‘private/public’ art, the movement is also very significant for a sociological understanding of art because of the reconstruction, that it entails, of the relationship between art and society.

Catalouge Note | Gita Chadha

‘Untitled: a show on the boundaries’ is conceptualized as part of the Asiatika project which engages the public with issues of culture and heritage. The Asiatika, an outreach program, uses the ‘walk’ as an informal pedagogical tool to educate and inform the public about the historical and intellectual context of the Asiatic society of Mumbai, a knowledge-making institution. Two hundred years old, the Asiatic Society of Mumbai is an institution with links to our colonial past. It is a society of intellectuals and scholars, a library and a repository of rare treasures from the past. Though open to all in principle, institutions like the Asiatic society often lie corralled within their own shell, representing what comes to be known as ‘high’ culture, a term particularly used with reference to the arts. ’Untitled’ is also conceived within the framework of the Mohile Parikh Center’s public art intervention project called ‘The Mumbai Project’ which reflects the contemporary trends in art that seek to either revitalize conventional viewing spaces or locate art practices out of these spaces. The Mohile Parikh Center, a contemporary institution promoting art theory and practice at the frontlines, through it’s ‘Mumbai Project’ seeks to activate, intellectually and physically, city spaces and city scapes. Knowledge in a library space is as available and as enclosed as art in a museum or gallery space. In both, the library and the museum, the space is accessible to a public which chooses to go there: the conditions of making this ‘choice’ are, however, socio-cultural and determine which segment of the public has the ‘right to access’. Asiatika and The Mumbai Project in that sense, are critical negotiations with existing knowledge-making and art-making practices. ‘Untitled’ positions itself on the threshold to grapple with and grasp the notion of a public sphere which is not “manufactured” but which can generate an engaged public opinion, in other words, a vital public sphere.

The library or the museum, while forming its own constituency, makes a two-way demarcation. It not only separates its own ‘public’ from the larger public outside but also from the inner world of the institution thus lending it an exclusivity. Sharmila Samant’s ‘In-scribed’ challenges this process and makes the movement inward, seeking to include stories and histories of the people nurturing the library and according them a place within history. Using a method that borders on conventional ethnography, the work mirrors the academic practice of the social sciences. And yet, the narratives, presented in a literary/documentary style, write the subjective self into the text, thus bringing forth a necessary reflexivity. The biographies that ‘In-scribed’ collects and documents reveal multiple engagements with the Asiatic society as an institution and with Mumbai city at large.

Vidya Kamat’s ‘Tolerating Intolerance’, on the other hand, focuses on violence against culture, both as cultural-policing and as vandalizing of cultural artifacts. In spite of inhabiting a sheltered space, cultural producers of knowledge and art – institutions and individuals – have always been vulnerable to attacks. Drawing upon the language of advertising, ‘Tolerating Intolerance’ is a work that represents the anguish and struggle that reconstructs the body-mind-self of the intellectual in the context of such violence. While the recoil into the ‘womb’, into the ‘sheltered’ space, may seem like the natural reaction in face of such onslaught it is to the possibility of using dissent in the creation of a vital public sphere that ‘Tolerating Intolerance’ gravitates towards.

‘Untitled’ seeks to renegotiate the spaces inside and outside and in doing this affirms the boundary-the threshold- as a vantage point. The famous Town Hall steps assume new significance – they are literally the steps that connect the inside and the outside. Bombay Punch-i-karana, the participatory performance designed by the two artists for the inaugural evening, symbolizes the commitment we make to bridge these worlds. In traditional cosmology, Panchikarana is the coming together of the five primal elements in synthesizing the world which stands in an essential relations to the psychic world of the five senses. Bombay Punch, on the other hand, is a drink made of five ingredients, which was served at the grand celebration of the opening of the St. Thomas Church in 1718 – a significant bit in the history of the creation of colonial Bombay. Bombay Punch-i-karana, which undertakes the symbolical but playful cleaning of the Town Hall steps and issues a public invitation on cushions inscribed with messages, is simultaneously cathartic and celebratory of a post-colonial contemporary identity. Incidentally, the municipal water that will be used to clean the steps, goes through its own process of Panchikarna – of mixing together waters from the five lakes around the city of Bombay/Mumbai. Bombay Punch-i-karana is performed as an ode to the city which takes all in her flow – the lives, the stories, the histories – and makes boundaries only to allow transgressions.