Persistence of Memory IV: the prefix "Re"

Honore Daumier

The prefix 're' started occurring vigorously in the post-structuralism phase. It was a landmark event when Derrida started breaking representation as 're'-presentation. George Luis Borges's comment like everything has been said and done already, nothing is new, what we can do now is to repeat only, - remained essential in many ways. In last two decades, thus, all the studies became re-visits, re-interpretations, re-examinings. Now-a-day thinkers re-think, onlookers re-look, and thus takers re-take.

Copying the great artists were a popular tradition ever in every traditions. The new generations learnt things by copying the early generation works. Not very consciously, but in performance art practices also it used to happen in certain ways. Here is an anecdote.

Taufik and Rahul in 'measuring with stretched bodies'

Syed Taufik Riaz, the Kolkata born Performace art practitiobner was doing some performance where he measures distance with his body lying on the ground. It was a practice taken from a popular Hindu ritual known as parikrama. In Mathura- Vrindavan area there are certain pathways around the holly hill of Govardhana where people make a circumambulatory journey measuring the path with bodies. However in a certain evidence where Taufik was practicing, Rahul Bhattacharya, writer and critic who developed interest in performative works lately also joined Taufik in the act. The act of Taufik was a silent and individualistic one. Taufik usually do not do public events such as: he does not call people to be 'audience', he does not go for public announcements. Then Rahul told me in a personal conversation that, "I was trying to experience what Taufik was having during the act. It could be seen as students of art copying great artists or established works to learn the process or to get the experience. If in painting or sculpture we learn from copying, then why not in performance?"

But in performance the method of learning through 'copying' may not work in the way it worked in other mediumistic practices. The philosophical traditions may have explored it, the representational arts may have done it. In music, singers and composers get established by copying the popular and established traditions. But in performance art, the genre what we know by the term, stands so isolated from any sort of obligations or boundaries that 'copying' and 'conventionalizing' or 'traditinalizing' were not welcome. At the same time the practices claimed some novelty or uniqueness, but used some pre-practiced act-based norms in the past. Thus paradoxically, some elements remained obvious and predictable even after the radical and extraordinariness. For example, appearing nude (after Marina Abramović, Vanessa Beecroft Carolee Schneemann?); making the body of the 'self' vulnerable (after works like "Rhythm 0" by Abramovic?); cutting cloths on a living body (after Yoko Ono?); allowing the public to scribble on the body of the performer (after Piero Manzoni?), stretching the body (after Dennis Oppenheim?), hurting the body of the self and taking risk (after Chris Burden?), use of vegetables and food; displaying of private body parts; reading a piece of writing at certain created circumstance (after Carolee Schneemann?); having costumed visual imagery and getting photographed in certain locations (after Rebecca Horn?), frequent re-occurrence of blood, urine and excreta; use of menstrual blood; or masturbating in performance (after Vito Acconci?) and so on.

Now why did I state that copying might not work good in 'performance art'? For that we shall come to another blog in coming days.

In Indian History of Art, learning through copying got a new phenomena in the Santiniketan school under the guidance of Acharya Nandalal Bose what Parvez Kabir proposed to say as 'The Nandalal Program'[1].

In his paper "Copies before Originals: Notes on a few Black House reliefs at Santiniketan", Kabir examines the strategies and functions behind the 'copy' works inscribed on the surface of the 'Black House' in a nuanced way. He comes to a conclusion, "The question of essence here, paradoxically then, is a modernist question all the way. For Nandalal and his people, the Black house reliefs were not schemas which they turned into appearances. They were rather the opposite; appearances of life-forms which were abstracted and synthesized into the universal schemas of form-making. The road of revelation was from image to form; from object to practice, and not the other way around. Seen in this light, the reliefs, as copies, indeed appear very modern in character. They seem to work as facilitators between modernist form-making and ancient objects of art, and one is even tempted to say that they don’t follow the originals, but precede them in a way. After all, it is only through their discursive mediation do we see the originals as formal constructions".

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" (original Spanish title: "Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote") is a short story written in the form of a review or literary critical piece about Pierre Menard, a fictional 20th-century French writer by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. It begins with a brief introduction and a listing of Menard's work. Borges' "review" describes Menard's efforts to go beyond a mere "translation" of Don Quixote by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 17th-century Spanish. Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation and interpretation.

George Luis Borges

"Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" is a form of literary criticism but through the medium of fantasy, irony, and humor. His narrator/reviewer considers Menard's fragmentary Quixote (which is line-for-line identical to the original) to be much richer in allusion than Cervantes's "original" work because Menard's must be considered in light of world events since 1602.

What happens if a writer re-writes a work of fiction by another writer 'as-it-is' or 'as-it-was', without changing anything of it? Is a copy only comprehensible only in the light of the original? How to read an original, and moreover, is it ever possible to trace the 'originality' of the original (so called)?

'Lady under moonlight' after Raja Ravi verma

When Pushpamala N copies Ravi Verma or Sher-Gil or any other pre-existent 'work of art', though we see it as a 're-interpretation', though we try to find out some 'subjective' presence of the 'present' artist, it is true that Pushpamala tries her best to 'justify' the original remaining 'truthful' as-much-as possible to the 'original' regarding the composition, colors, lights/lightings, expressions, bodily resemblance and so on. She never had any deliberate attempt to introduce or implement any visual element, which could be subjective and contemporary intervention, from her time. She tried to behave like the women in early twentieth Century woman, as it were portrayed already out there with much sincerity.

The impressions Project (Sunday Afternoon)

Bringing the River to the Festival

Noteworthy that in many contemporary pop-ish art practices it is available to see the contemporary elements juxtaposed into a pre-given set-up. Most recently critic and writer terned to performative practitioner Rahul Bhattacharya has been developing a series of 'copy' or 're-take' works. His 'The impressions Project (Sunday Afternoon)', a performative video based on Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, tries to resemble the composition of Seurat, but the elements are taken from the contemporary everyday life of Kolkata[2] a city in Indian state of West Bengal.  Earlier to that, a collaborative single channel video loop 'Bringing the River to the Festival', with Chinmoyi Patel, 're enacting' 'Luncheon on the Grass' was a site specific work[3]. It also imitates Édouard Manet only in the composition and the placement of characters against the backdrop-landscape, but the elements were essentially from the contemporary Surat (a city in Indian state of Gujarat).

*

"Reproducing an image is of course not only a question of re-presenting it physically", as Susie Tharu says in the 'Philosophy of Copy' section in her piece "This is not an inventory: Norm and performance in everyday femininity". Tharu says, " A major proposal made here is that far from being the derivative and mindless job that it is usually made out to be, copying or reproduction throws up unprecedented material and conceptual challenges."[4]

"... When the artists cite/perform a film still or an ethnographic record, they are citing the composition as well as its histories—as a whole as well as in parts. There is no guarantee that whole and part, or different parts, will travel together, or at the same pace, into the present day performance. In fact the only guarantee is the opposite: that however stern and demanding the copy, like the famous stick in the river, the image is necessarily changed in/by the citation."[5]

"While the formal task that is addressed here is imitation/reproduction, the success of'Native Women is in the attention it focuses on the terrain of difference.

Pushpamala herself draws our attention to this play of difference, even in the restrained citations that comprise the Native Types, using her larger-than-normal-Indian-woman body size as example of the

impossibility of the perfect copy and the possibilities opened up in that impossibility. Is it her body that is ill proportioned (a quintessentially contemporary response to the mirror image, the response perhaps that drives fashion, consumption and capital globally)? Or does the lack of fit open out onto time itself

and change, the tenuous materiality of the image, dependent on citation for its life. Does it point to the everyday labor of history that is the human predicament, to the sustaining presence of community and pull of virtue, to the logic of power that must wrestle continuously with the possibility of revolution, and the converse, the possibility of revolution if we are able to continuously wrestle with the logic of power? Is the force of agency to be understood, not as a voluntarist act, but in the possibilities offered by such citational practice?

The contrast between the dynamic of citation, reiteration, recreation, that is being explored here, and the questions raised by the aesthetic of expression/creation, is evident. The idea of the copy shifts the focus of interest from nature/ reality and creation (physical nature; the aesthetic impulse) to culture—an inheritance of shared meanings, their histories and politics. The questions that arise in this domain are of symbolic intelligibility, communication, dialogue, translation, travel. Attention shifts from reality to the image, to the virtual form of the real, to political histories of image making, the logic of image formation, dissemination, travel; from identity to the practices of identification and regulation, their role in the configuration and maintenance of power/domination; from a notion of performance as agentive, or as a never adequate representation of an ideal script, to the sense of performance as originary, and to the constituting and de-constituting possibilities of citation. The focus now is less on the image-objects themselves, and more on the process of their making, their formation and institutional location,

their relations with other images."[6]

The mediumistic shift that Pushpamala explored was doubly troubled and risk taking. Unlike other copy or re-creation works it did not undergo the troubles of one another medium troubles. It is not that she simply turned a oil painting to an photograph, or a moving picture into a stilled one. To encapture a lady from Raja Ravi Verma's oil or oleograph in a photographic medium, she had to enact it first under certain spatial artifice. The drapery, the chiaroscuro, the grounding of objects - all material elements had to be placed in real three dimensional space before capturing and printing on a two dimensional surface. Thus the labor of the recreation had undergone pains of realizing and exploring material qualities at multiple levels. This labor and pain remained the most essential aspects that the performance practitioners and actors loved to endure ever in the history.

[to be continued...]

---

[1] Parvez Kabir, "Copies before Originals: Notes on a few Black House reliefs at Santiniketan".

[2] Screened at Studio 21, Kolkata on 30th June, 2014, 'The impressions Project (Sunday Afternoon)', a performative video based on Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

[3] Done for "Scapes : City / Land" , taking place as a part of Tapi Utsav

[4] Susie Tharu, "This is not an inventory: Norm and performance in everyday femininity", Native women of South India : manners and customs/ Pushpamala, N; Clare Arni; Bangalore: Indian Foundation for The Arts, 2004.

[5] Susie Tharu, "This is not an inventory: Norm and performance in everyday femininity", Native women of South India : manners and customs/ Pushpamala, N; Clare Arni; Bangalore: Indian Foundation for The Arts, 2004.

[6] Susie Tharu, "This is not an inventory: Norm and performance in everyday femininity", Native women of South India : manners and customs/ Pushpamala, N; Clare Arni; Bangalore: Indian Foundation for The Arts, 2004.

Persistence of Memory III: The repertoire of Pushpamala N

A generic overview: Random Thoughts

Human face and Human body is the most expressive element for a human onlooker, where as in other natural elements also we relate to things with regard to human anatomical expressions. We see the face of a mother or the beloved in the moon, we see the curves of a reclining human body on the contours of mountains.

In the history of visual representations human face (i.e. portraits) and human figures remained so central so long and it will remain so in the future. Though there was a certain period marked in the history for the rise of 'humanism', the humanistic depiction and humanistic perception was already out there across the visual understandings. Human body remained the microcosm for all, either in conscience or in subconscious mind.

When photography and camera introduced to human, it again focused on portraits and capturing the human body essentially. For the computer screen, for any sort of image-editing platform there are two modes: portrait- that is vertical and Landscape, meaning something horizontal. When the digital takes over the analogs: you point a digital camera in any direction, it will search for the human face and the display screen or monitor will identify the faces with square boxes. The system is in Facebook and other online forums also where the human face is quickly found out automatically to tag or to name or to identify.

All these features have something to do with voyeurism and scopophilia: wherever the human body and the matter of looking and gazing are concerned. 

When photography introduced into the art world, the creator photographer remained the artist just like the painter who paints, the sculptor who sculpts. The subject matter, particularly in photography, is always given, found material. It happened because the art of photography was ever considered as a medium of documentation rather than a creation. Though in the history of painting also, we remembered the artists but never asked about the models who posed for it.

Now, we shall talk about the aspects around photographic capturing and turning live into a framed visual, shifting the focus from the shooter-as-artist. the history of the shooter and the history of the objects shooted share the same historical timeline. If there were capturer who wanted to capture a portrait, there must be a subject who wanted to be captured.

Now the psychology of the objects of capturing, shooting, framing has multiple interesting facets to observe. The camera made everyone narcissist: the ones who love to be photographed, and the ones as well who hides face as soon as notices a camera around. Perhaps never in the history before the camera's intervene, human felt the stage-fright and subjective conscience. The camera started making an ordinary person: subject, actor, object, focal point. Then starts the self-consciousness regarding the representation of the self. A small piece of represented visual, i.e. a photograph, taken as something beyond the everyday ordinariness, as it turned to be a magic-box for recollection of memories in the future, and at present, a hive of possibilities in coming future. Thus it turned to be 'larger than life'. Ambiguities and fear started here: what if I'm represented wrongly! A sort of stage fright! Then starts some common adaptations of posing in front of the camera.  

Performance art, across the globe, has at least one thing in common, that is making the body of the subject central and transcending the bodily presence into something else from what is it. So it is not difficult to understand the insisting energies behind a "costumed" performance art. And then 'posing for camera' entered into 'performance art'. And then posing for camera, with costumes, with crafted mise-en-scene got a different history.

The repertoire of Pushpamala N

Pushpamala N, with her splendid repertoire stands pioneer and limelighter in performance photography in India. Recreation of popular cinematic sensibilities, re-taking of mythological characters that kept overwhelming the society for ages, re-presenting the representations of women in representational visual art tradition in India and along with many other vigorous and vivid energy  Pushpamala N stands forth.  

She was the first as she herself claims in the interview "Beyond the Self": "It was a turning point I think, for my work as well for Indian Art because nobody had done conceptual photography before..."

The achievement of Pushpamala is multifaceted. Firstly her works took the tradition of 'copy' and 're-takes' to a completely different level which was never imagined before. secondly, the focus on visual sensibility and mise-en-scene kept her outstanding within the realms of visual arts and performance arts. Her works remained highly conceptual without being abstract but figurative. I think serious art practice is necessary to human life and expression. In her voice: "My work is very conceptual, but I don't want it to be dry[1]". Forms, colors and other representational elements in her works are so affluent  that even if she was not the first one to do this (if some debatable argument occurs somewhere), still she holds the ability to stand as a milestone in the genre.  Thirdly, the balanced understanding of the mediums like film, photography, sculpture and painting, along with the balanced appropriation of political contexts made her works ever comprehensive. Her takes on mythology and representation of women have feminist connotations, but they are not overtly feminist. Yet they are much more stronger to make the viewer to think about certain issues- than many feminist works of her contemporary times. 

The early phase of the photo performances of Pushpamala had some concerns with 'Documentation'. Realised through a two-year India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) grant, their unusual concept is explained thus: "Pushpamala, South Indian artist, and Clare Arni, British photographer who has lived most of her life in South India — one black, one white — play the protagonists in a project exploring the history of photography as a tool of ethnographic documentation. Playing with the notions of subject and object, the photographer and the photographed, white and black, real and fake, the baroque excess of the images subvert and overturn each other[2]."

Thus the representation here started with the concern of documenting. In Susie Tharu's words: "It soon becomes evident that what has hitherto been described and celebrated as creation/revelation/fact/truth may itself today be more usefully read as citation, reiteration, intertextuality. Key questions would be: How and to what effect is the "Toda" "woman" cited in colonial ethnography? What are the processes that are formative of the "empirical" facts of tribal life, or in another instance, the physiognomy of the criminal body? How is the Lakshmi figure and her double, the knife-wielding dominatrix, cited in a modern, nationalist cosmology? How does the dancing dervish of popular south Indian Islam fit into these schemes?"[3]

Profile 

Pushpamala N. was born in 1956 in Bangalore. Her early training was in sculpture, but as her practice progressed she brought an early enthusiasm for narrative figuration into her photographic work. Pushpamala’s photographic works are usually created as series, some the artist refers to as projects, others as ‘photo-romances’. Pushpamala uses her own body to perform different roles in these series, which draw from the imagery of popular culture, mythology and historical references from India and elsewhere, using humour, wit and a sharp critical gaze to look at contemporary society.

Pushpamala’s performative photography and videos sometimes function as a kind of installation, where the exhibit may resemble a film or theatre museum or even a movie theatre. She conceives, researches, scripts and designs the mise-en-scenes, working with photographers or photo studios to produce the work where her friends may play supporting roles, or offer their places as locations, which also function as hidden ‘jokes’.  She has also made experimental short films that play with film genres. Pushpamala has exhibited internationally and her work is held in many major institutional and private collections. She lives and works in Bangalore and New Delhi, India[4].

"...  In Pushpamala, the photographic medium creates a similar sense of estrangement from both the self and the cultural mythology it embodies. While the artist’s self becomes distributed and re-assembled as myth, the camera breaks the mythic surface into an uncanny array of competing references. At the same time, the carefully staged images insist on their indexicality: the heft and weight of the body, the facial contortions, the crumpled garments, the stilled mist were all present before the lens. The photograph’s capacity to reveal what Walter Benjamin calls the ‘optical unconscious’ of the visible world produces in the body a new effect, that of mutability[5]. It is only when the indexical image of such a body looks back from that virtual point, as Foucault has it[6], that it reinscribes a sense of self in both the artist and the viewer"[7].

In an interview with Aditi De[8] Pushpamala says, "I've been doing performance photography, instead of sculpture, since the 1997 Phantom Lady series, which Clare saw in the United Kingdom. As a photojournalist, she's interested in images of South Indian women. That captured my imagination. We decided to collaborate and applied for an IFA grant for our ambitious work, a departure from the performative photo-romances or studio portraiture I'd earlier directed".

In the interview it was continued: "In my earlier performance photographs, a mise en scene was set up. Other characters and I posed, while a still photograph was taken. Both Clare and I were interested in the tableaux form. We decided to recreate representations from different media — paintings, newspaper photographs, historical photography, advertisements, film stills, including goddesses, mythological characters and criminals. Clare insisted that each shoot should differ in terms of image, set, lighting, costume, even character. Of course, the 1960s Jayalalithaa picture (in Zorro-style action gear) from the India Today cover connects directly with the Phantom Lady. Choosing the painterly Ravi Varma woman with the pot suited us fine because I was working with hoarding painters for the backdrops, and he's been so influential in forming the image of the Indian woman."

  

[to be continued...]

---

[1] Interview with Adity De

[2] http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2004/03/28/stories/2004032800400800.htm

[3] Susie Tharu, "This is not an inventory: Norm and performance in everyday femininity", Native women of South India : manners and customs/ Pushpamala, N; Clare Arni; Bangalore: Indian Foundation for The Arts, 2004.

[4] http://www.portrait.gov.au/site/exhibition_subsite_beyondtheself_artist.php?artistID=15

[5] Walter Benjamin, ‘A small history of photography’, in One way street and other writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London and New York: Verso, 1997, pp. 242–43.

[6] Michel Foucault and Jay Miskowiec, ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, Spring 1986, p. 24.

[7] Ajay Sinha, Professor of Art History and Film Studies, Mount Holyoke College, United States, http://www.portrait.gov.au/site/exhibition_subsite_beyondtheself_artist.php?artistID=15

[8] see link: http://www.thehindu.com/thehindu/mag/2004/03/28/stories/2004032800400800.htm

Persistence of memory II: 'Live' and its other: the alter-live

[The writing is a part of "Persistence of memory: Methods and Perceptions in “Documentation”- Sustainability of the ephemeral" by Samudra Kajal Saikia]

From the very early stage when I started doing performance art in the '70s, the general attitude - not just me, but also my colleagues - was that there should not be any documentation, that the performance itself is artwork and there should be no documentation.

-Marina Abramovic

Documentation has continued to be an issue that plagues live art and ever since Peggy Phelan declared it a ‘betrayal’ of liveness it has been much debated academically if documentation can ever be representational.

Allan Taylor[1]

Let us proceed with views of two contemporary practitioners living in Delhi, Inder Salim, the artist-became-institute for contemporary performance dialogues in the city and Amitesh Grover, Assistant Professor of National School of Drama and a practitioner of performer along with technological interfaces. It was strongly put forward by Inder Salim that, a performance is a performance and a video is a video. Both are two distinguished mediums. Not even in ignorance they could be replaced in place of the other.[2]

"Are we still thinking of documented images of Performance pieces as authentic representations? I guess, video is video and performance is performance, both are autonomous in their respective domains. We can indeed randomly mix anything, but not at the cost of innocence." 

Then we come to Amitesh Grover another performance artist who argues for a parallel sense of "reality" set across by the digital world in contemporary times, which might alter the notion of "live" or "live-ness" that we have been perceived so far.

"The phenomenology of body has gone through a significant change. Technology has come and completely displaced the sense of 'live'ness for us. And this divorce in spatial dynamics has completely changed the way we look at the live body. This kind of a live-ness is asking us why it is important to be physically present and be live. Why is it still important to do a performance where the performer is physically present."[3]

With Grover's views of the new 'live'ness, we shall see the analysis of Sarah Bay-Cheng, in her "Theatre Squared: Theatre History in the Age of Media", where she says about the new "geography", "With the affordability and flexibility of digital recording devices and ease of distribution (e.g., web sites like YouTube and MySpace), moving images are rapidly becoming the primary currency for artistic exchange."

Allan Taylor deals with the same problem, "As we move further and further in the digital age, the issue of documentation has become a more prevalent and practical issue. With the ability to capture work on photo and film at cheaper and easier levels than in the 1990s and with the introduction of social media like YouTube, Twitter and Flickr, performance artists are expected to have a wealth of ‘proof’ that their work has existed before approaching a producer or potential funding partners. Applications from artists who choose not to document is often seen as low priority and occasionally discarded completely. This shift in the applications of documentation means that we must also be forward thinking in how we utilize it"[4].

Rebecca Schneider deals with similar anxiety in her "Cut, Click, Shudder: The ‘Document Performance’: “… recently, I have been engaged in trying to unthink  some of our long-sedimented distinctions between medial forms (such as between performance and photography) as I have been suspect of the category of the ‘live’, to the degree that it pretends to delimit a present moment to instantaneity. I have been also been suspect of the habit of the category of the ‘live’ to reify a supposed antithesis: very often posited as the object, the remains, the trace, or death"[5].

Among the diversified attempts within the art practices it is established that the technological devices: camera, internet, computer, graphics-tablet and so on, have not remained mere tools of 'capturing' for re-visionary looks. But at the same time, by large those are tools for documentations as well. "Supposedly, a photograph is always already a record, as it appears to survive something that can be called the ‘live’ event- standing in as a trace or document of something that ‘was there’ (as Barthes would have it) but ‘is’ no longer. Does this way of thinking about photography limit our access to a photograph as event- as a performance of duration- taking place ‘live’ in an ongoing scene of circulation, re-circulation, encounter, re-encounter, and collaborative exchange with viewers, reviewers, reenactors, re-performers, re-photographers?”[6] Now the slippery surface occurs where a documentation tends to become an artwork, and a work holds the sensibilities of a documentation. The threat in front of the conventional understanding of the 'live' is much more severe today.

"In 1964, Canadian pianist Glenn Gould quit live performance in favor of perfecting recordings of his performances. In an essay published two years later, “The Prospects of Recording” (1966), Gould explained his decision by predicting that in the next century, the live concert would reach “extinction.” Citing the example of Gould, Sarah Bay-Cheng points, "The end of the live concert may never come, but Gould’s comments are eerily prescient of contemporary performance and its reliance on recording technology: first film, then video, and, more recently, digital recording. Much attention has been paid to the impact of these technologies on live theatre production and reception, but little criticism to date has considered the impact of recording technology on theatre history, on the archive in the making. And yet, moving images on screens have become a dominant, arguably the dominant, mode of viewing throughout our increasingly mediatized culture. From portable DVD players to video iPods to cellular phones, modern culture communicates onscreen..."[7].

The crossover of work-to-document and document-to-work, and the circumstantially increased spectatorship of the media-governed 'double' of the work becomes problematic for the practitioners besides of the immense possibilities brought by the same. " Amid the usual hand-wringing over aging subscribers and the loss of young audiences to mass screen entertainment, live theatre is now threatened by its own media double"[8].   

 

on the documentary as documentary segment Inder Salim put forward his articulation to this author in a personal mail[9]: "Beyond the known purpose and meaning of term, 'documentation', if we attempt to understand it a little deeply, we may first know what is Ontology. "In philosophy, Ontology is study of what exists in general, and how things are related to each other. Are physical things more real than immaterial things, are physical objects like shoes more real than walking, and what is the relationship between shoes and walking. Yes, Ontological Materialism tells us how material of a thing is more real than mental perception of it, but ‘ontological idealism’ suggests that reality is a construct of human mind and consciousness than the material which apparently holds it ".

Inder continues, "Well, this way we may say that documentation  is something which  walks all along with the action(s) that occur in 'the present' of a performance art piece. We are free to filter out what looks like archival material later and what we remember as pure action. Something was indeed destined to face  evaporation of sorts and something certainly accumulates  into our bones. We are residues of our own behavior and thought processes at every moment of time. As performance artists, we have perhaps  chosen to accept the fact that  documentation tool , say a camera enters the performance site and plays its roles like another spectator, active in its own singular way. We do meet images later the way we meet the people who happened to be part of that moment of Harkat/performance."

 

"Perhaps, time has come when we nit-and-rip all these terms and categories with some love and rebel, to discover ourselves upon some imagined carpet for a new flight. I don’t see documentation of a performance extraneous to what is happening elsewhere. A camera is finally a tool to think body and myriad subjects that surround it all the time. And above all, the body too is finally a line-work between many constructs and materials that exists effortlessly within the spinning realms of realities and fictions around it. Likewise, we do occupy a space at a given point of time, and that time, that time when we begin to notice the elements that go into the making of that particular present, we automatically cross from one category to another through a given porosity of walls between this and that. Different thinkers around this subject  have much lucidly explained the exiting ‘order of things’ in a very beautiful and expressive language, and we feel connected to their thoughts because the fluidity of thoughts never ceases to flow, therefore, this present , river like."

So it is to be realized that when someone promotes the 'live' against the 're-takes' or post-live 'documents', it is not that the post-live life is ignored or opposed. By practice Inder Salim tries to keep himself much closer  to the liveness of performance as body-art: by keeping the stretched body as a measure of work, by sustaining the "nudity" a device of protocol, reinstating the vulnerability of the socially and culturally inscribed body, and at the end of all, putting much attention into the act and the dialogue instead of the mise-en-scene (in its regular sense).  

"His name is itself intended to provoke and reconcile: he changed it from Inder Tikku to Inder Salim[10]" and here raises a different mode of documented "live" which seeks severe attention.  

At the same time there is a considerable amount of efforts seen in the country where artists are engaged into the scopophilia, the media-intervened 'live', and "document-turned-into origin" sort of practices.

[to be continued in upcoming updates...]

---

[1] Allan Taylor, "Documentation of (Mis)Representation: Towards An Archival Future of the Performative Photograph"

[2] following a debate on the post-event discussions through Facebook after the event "36 Hours". "Besides my little act on Modi Mask, Suhail ( if i remember the name correctly ) did a wonderful poetic performance. He said, “ I reveal, I take it back, I reveal , I take it back” He revealed his body in parts. It was precise and genuinely poetic indeed, The organizer wanted to project the video of it and have a discussion. Now, if it was not sufficient , how will the video of it would be? Are we still thinking of documented images of Performance pieces as authentic representations? I guess, video is video and performance is performance, both are autonomous in their respective domains. We can indeed randomly mix anything, but not at the cost of innocence." Inder Salim, 36hours, June 15 at 1:08PM.

[3] Amitesh Grover as told to the author, inserted in the teaser on "Understanding Performance", May, 2014, NSD Campus.

[4] Allan Taylor, "Documentation of (Mis)Representation: Towards An Archival Future of the Performative Photograph"

[5] Rebecca Schneider deals with similar anxiety in her "Cut, Click, Shudder: The ‘Document Performance’

[6] Rebecca, continues: “… Why can a performance not take place as a photograph? We are habituated, for example, to thinking of the ‘present’ as singular, unfolding a linear temporality that is, to my mind, problematic. Given my trouble with linear time, I have been very interested in the fact that theatricality demands a simultaneity of temporal registers – the always at  least ‘double’ aspect of the theatrical, about which Gertrude Stein remarked that the “endless trouble” of theatre is its syncopated time. To this end I have been looking for what Homi K. Bhabha has termed “temporal lag”, and which Elizabeth Freeman has spun to “temporal drag”. These tropes have lately afforded me a productive set of tools to apply to the effort to articulate the longstanding interinanimation of live media (such as performance) with media of capture, or media-resulting documents or objects or images (such as photography).

[7] Bay-Cheng, Sarah, "Theatre Squared: Theatre History in the Age of Media", Theatre Topics, Volume 17, Number 1, March 2007, pp. 37-50 (Article)Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, DOI: 10.1353/tt.2007.0001

[8] Ibid

[9] Through a dialogue in gmail: Thurseday, April 17, 2014 at 9:36 PM

[10] GEETA KAPUR ( from 'The Art Cities of the Future' , 2Ist Century Avant Gardes. PHAIDON )