[The writing is a part of "Persistence of memory: Methods and
Perceptions in “Documentation”- Sustainability of the ephemeral" by
Samudra Kajal Saikia]
 |
| Vivan Sundaram, Bourgeois Family: Mirror Frieze, 2001, digital photomontage |
Multiplied Vantage Points and "Bourgeois Family: Mirror Frieze, 2001"
Here is an image with a riddle like arrangement of subjects and viewpoints.
The complexity and the sense of multiplicity within the composition is only comparable
to that of Velazquez's "Las Meninas". The similarly or resemblance is
felt not only due to complexity of composition, but also for the woven out maze
or labyrinth of gaze within the subjects.
,_by_Velazquez.jpg) |
| Velazquez's "Las Meninas |
The composition is 'theatrical'. It is theatrical in the way we
usually mean by the term, but also the way Philip Auslander tries to identify
two major approaches in documented performance or performance photography.
"From a
traditional perspective, the documentary and theatrical categories are mutually
exclusive. If one insists upon the ontological relationship by demanding that,
to qualify as a performance, an event must have an autonomous existence prior
to its documentation, then the events underlying the works in the second
category are not performances at all and the images are not documents, but
something else, another kind of art work perhaps (the phrase “performed
photography,” for instance, suggests that such works be understood as a kind of
photograph rather than as performances).
From a different perspective, however, the two categories appear to
have much in common. Although it is true that the theatrical images in the
second category either had no significant audience other than the camera or
could have had no such audience (because they never took place in real space),
it is equally true that the images in both categories were staged for the
camera"[1].
We shall come down to that discussion after a while. However, saying
theatrical in its regular sense, there is a point of paradox to notice that,
unlike any other commonly appearing proscenium-theatre-visuals, the 'real'
characters in the frame are not facing the 'real' spectator, but giving back to
the audience- which is a taught as a fault in proscenium stage acting. What
frontal to the audience are the mirror reflections: the reflected selves.
Other than the reflected selves being frontal in appearance, second
interesting matter in the composition is that there are about three characters
in the composition who does not have even 'real' /corporeal presence, but only
reflections: the old man (Umrao Sing Sher Gil), the child or grandchild on his
lap (Vivan Sundaram himself) in the left of the work, and on the right a woman
(Amrita Sher Gil) with a cap. Though three 'real' persona are there in front
of the mirrors, dissimilarly there are about six reflected beings that are
visible to us. Thus, by the frontality, and by numbers, the reflected self/selves
has dominance here over the 'real' physical existence.
Third point to notice is the gazes of the central three characters
that are actually lost in the reflected selves. The woman in hat at the left corner
is looking at herself. The lady (the mother) at center stage is looking at
herself. The lady in Indian Saree at
the right corner is also looking at herself. The woman behind the woman in saree is seemingly looking back at the spectator
of the artwork, but maybe she is actually looking at her own-self only, since
we have not seen her physical spatial location in regard of the mirror within
the composition. There is, however, a grandfather who is not looking at the self,
and a grandchild who also is not looking at the self. In fact, the grandchild
is the only character who is looking back or gazing back at the spectator of
the art work, being the subject of it.
The grandchild is none but the
artist of the artwork, the creator of the composition, the first onlooker of
the visual schema, Vivan Sundaram, as he says in a video at Tate, Modern, 2007, "...I
have double portrait of amrita as European and Indian, I have the mother
looking at herself and I am seated on my grandfather's lap with the camera and
so in a sense as if I'm taking this photograph"[2]. So as
he portrays himself "as if" himself is taking the photograph, that
establishes that the artist is portraying the self as the creator. Here one can
find another striking resemblance with that of Velazquez's and many other works
of the time where the artist presented the self as artist and the time when
"Artists' studio" remained a frequently appearing subject matter.
Thus could this work of art be named as "Artist's Studio"?
Fourthly, almost all the
characters in this play are playing the role of a spectator instead of a mere
performer. If they are performing, they are performing the insights and gazes.
Before we see the performers, the performers themselves are looking at them. In
that way we are only the second layered audience. The staging of the
characters, despite of the plurality of bodily presence, gives a sense of
interior monologues, not outward modulation. Here are multiple monologues
co-existing simultaneously.
Fifth aspect to observe: there are multiple vantage points being
polarize. The complexity is celebrated, almost deliberately, across the gazes,
spatial positioning of corporeal and reflected ones as stated already.
Moreover, the complexities are there with regard to the presence of multiple
generations within the same frame , as well as, with the cross-cultural
identities (European and Indian) embodied by the dress-codes. As Vivan Sundaram
states, "Amrita Sher Gil is of mixed parentage- mother Hungarian, father Sikh,
born in 1913 and in fact died when she was just 28 years old and those 28 years
she spent half of bit in Europe and half of bit in India. Her training was in
Paris and so therefore there was a strong influence of school of Paris of the
30s. But she liked the modernism not of very much avant garde type but a kind
of realism that evolved between the two wars. And in a sense that informed some
perspectives on the human figure. ... there is a tendency in Indian writings on
her .. she abandoned everything from the west and suddenly came to India, but
that's not correct...". Thus the complexity has a thematic origin,
"...to be able to transform these into various levels of relationships,
... but also it's about east and west identity, about modernity...".
"Vivan Sundaram is the
grandchild of Umrao Singh and nephew of Amrita Sher-Gil. In 1984 he created a
large-format painting "The Sher-Gil
Archive", and in 2001/2002 the cycle of digitally processed photographs "Re-take of Amrita". Re-take means to re-shoot a scene. Vivan
Sundaram chooses particular moments and guides attention, via specific
arrangements, to the hidden expressions in the found images of the family.
Under his direction the protagonists give a second performance and go a step farther
than was initially intended. The effect that springs from the confrontation of
female and male narcissism, the father's intense visual interest in his
daughter, as well as the duplication of a figure, is increased here to a
perturbing degree. Without expanding on the idea, Amrita herself once spoke of
the "hothouse atmosphere" that dominated her family life. In
"Re-take of Amrita" it becomes obvious what she may have meant by
this".
"In addition, Vivan Sundaram
charges the spiritual atmosphere, which is characterized by oscillating between
cultures, with a kind of pathos. The artificiality of his arrangements remains,
however, constantly present for the viewer. In this way, his position enters
the works as a contemporary artist, who views this pathos at a distance since
the ideas of home and abroad and of residing and traveling have been qualified
as opposites for him"[3].
No where the "Re-take of
Amrita" series is named as performance photography, but it is considered
or observed as "Under his direction the protagonists give a second
performance and go a step farther than was initially intended". Vivan
gives a newer dimension to the genre of 'family photograph', and moreover to
the ways of viewing it. Certainly the series is of photography based works
where the artist is not the 'photographer'. It was not possible at any cost to
go back to the past and shoot Amrita and Grandfather. So, "a lot of them
are to do with already found and existing
material". But the re-embodiment, re-configuration and 're'-representations
made by the artist made him the creator-photographer. "Once I got into the
digital format it allowed me to actually sort of take the family photograph
which indexically has no narrative element it is just documenting moment".
Thus the narrativity in the works are of the artist. The series has certain
narratives, reciprocated dialogues, characters placed in certain spatial
arrangements, sensational establishments of momentum, and hence they abide
certain sense of performativity. It is ontological, ideological and theatrical
at the same time. "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’...) 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?”[4]
[to be continued in upcoming updates...]
[1]
Auslander
[2]http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid950566900001?bckey=AQ~~,AAAAAG6PY30~,pi5vFvB_srjYp5aiO9CarP3pmhhmv11f&bclid=0&bctid=26406459001
[3]
The exhibition catalogue is published by Schirmer / Mosel. Penguin India
published a biography of Amrita Sher-Gil in 2006 and Vivan Sundaram will edit
"The Letters and Writings by Amrita" for Tulika Press in New Delhi.
In cooperation with the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, Ministry of
Culture, Government of India, New Delhi, and the Goethe-Institute, New Delhi.
http://www.museo-on.com/go/museoon/en/home/db/exhibitions/_page_id_169/_page_id_659.xhtml
[4]
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).
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