In the initial phase of my research work under the Ila Dalmia FICA
Research program I received a couple of levelheaded feedbacks from Bhooma
Padmanabhan and Vidya Shivadas, both of them belong to FICA team. Bhooma,
curator and art writer, wrote to me: “I felt that a
small framework explanation by you on how you are approaching the task of
‘archiving’ performance art would be useful. It need not be conclusive but at
least pointing to how you have begun the task.” Considering Bhooma’s
Suggestion, here I am trying to put forward few of the thematic concerns behind
the archival tasks that I have taken forward.
It is understood that, the tactile part of the process (“archiving”)
is time consuming, cost indulging and wide ranging enough. Here, instead of
going to the details of personal investments in meeting the practitioners,
photo documentations, exploring other archival resources it would be better to
focus on the conceptual grounding at the onset.
As the
current area of work is a part of a larger project that tries to look at the
contemporary performance art in India and to examine the methods of
historiography critically, it is obliged to be multifaceted and conjunctional
with cross-disciplinary methods. The archival methods and processes are very
much dependent on the prime concerns of the proposed research initiative that I
am justifying elsewhere. To make the concerns precise, as much as possible, in
the time of collecting materials [study, enquiry, personal interview and so on]
during the research period, I come up with a set of five Pillars.
The
previously uploaded interview “Conversely Conversed” with Manmeet Davgun was
unedited and broad ranging, that address the entire region of the subject and
it’s work. But the pivotal methods taken by me ahead are essentially based on
the proposed five Pillars.
*
Pillar 1
 |
| Paribartana Mohanty, Kino is the Name of a Forest |
 |
| Samudra Kajal Saikia, Camera at City as Studio (with Deepankar Gohain), SARAI |
Pillar 1
Persistence
of “Memory”: Methods and Perceptions in “Documentation”
[E]very performance ultimately meets
the video screen, where the demystified subject is frozen and dies. There,
performance once again encounters representation, from which it wanted to
escape at all costs and which marks both its fulfillment and its end.[1]
“Fe’ral notes the irony in the fact
that conceptual performance constructed its own history by means that are
antithetical to its integrity as performance: “with the help of the video
camera with which every performance ends, it has provided itself with a past”
(1982:175)[2].
When Sonia
Khurana does a video work like "Bird" and when she puts a
photography-based work "Re-take of Bird" there is a formal
mediumistic shift. Now how to see this? A visual documentation either in stills
or in moving images may be read as a work in itself. The 're'-presentation is
also a work in itself.
To extend
the matter, when a performance artist goes for a performance how much the
concerns around documentation matter in his/her mind? What a role played by the
post production concerns? Other than the time-and-space specific ephemeral
experience do the visual appeal of the later documentation make the artist
conscious?
 |
| Ernest Fischer |
 |
| Syed Taufik Riaz, MELT at R. A. P. E. 2012, Guwahati |
Pillar 2
Historical
Track point: Key Events in History behind the Immergence of the Form
"As a young artist in the '70s
New York downtown scene, I was pretty sure that we were doing everything for
the first time, that we were inventing a new art form. it even had a clumsy
new-sounding name "Performance Art", and critics and audiences
struggled to define this "new" hybrid that combined so many media and
broke so many rules about what art was supposed to be. So when RoseLee
Goldberg's book Performance: Live Art 1909 to the Present was first published
in 1979, I was completely amazed to find that what we were doing had a rich and
complex history."(p6, Foreword).[3]
There are
many propositions or arguments on the factors behind the emergence of
performance art, video and other media-arts in India. Some may read this as
(1) an attempt against
comodification,
(2) under some certain
political context,
(3) referring emerging
subjectivity under certain caste/ class/ gender based identity politics,
(4) a formalistic
experiment that tries to push further the margins of art-practice towards a
larger/different spectatorship.
In Indian
context, it is still ambiguous to trace a historical account on the emergence
of performance and media art. Here are my queries in front of “Indian” “contemporary”
performance art practitioners: How does one look at the ‘self’ in this regard:
how one has chosen the medium(s). Secondly how does one see the Indian art
scenario in this regard?
Where the
Performance Art is highly subjective, can a critique on it be ‘objective’? is
it possible to write a non-subjective history of it?
 |
| Ophelia, Disposable Theatre, Kankhowa |
 |
| Delhi Institute of Heritage and Research Management (DIHRM) invited to participate in the first inaugural session of Experiments in Pedagogy, KNMA, Delhi |
Pillar 3
The
practice as Discipline: Pedagogy and Praxis
Historically, performance art has been a medium that challenges and
violates borders between disciplines and genders, between private and public,
and between everyday life and art, and that follows no rules.[4]
We have been
witnessing emerging eagerness in the practice in Performance as art in current
times. Moreover a number of practitioner artists are frequently taking
initiatives in ‘training’. The much celebrated names like Inder Salim and Sonia
Khurana are mention worthy in this regard. By the time the establishment of a
department on Performance Art in the School of Culture and Creative
Expressions, Ambedkar University of Delhi in another important point.
Here raises
multiple takes on the "Training" and "Teaching" of
performance as art. The core problem lies in the ambiguities around the
definition itself as we know that a concrete definition of 'what exactly is
performance art' is still missing. In that case what are the methods to be
implied in the pedagogy? Most of the times Performance Art, the term, itself
denies to be considered as a ‘discipline’, and if this assumption is true, how
could a school or a methodical training applicable to it?
Pillar 4
Discipline
and Cross: an Adulterated Birth
"To be a performance artist, you have to hate theatre. Theatre is
fake: there is a black box, you pay for a ticket, and you sit in the dark and
see somebody playing somebody else's life. The knife is not real, the blood is
not real, and the emotions are not real. Performance is just the opposite: the
knife is real, the blood is real, and the emotions are real. It's a very
different concept. It's about true reality."[5]
Sometimes
while saying about something 'what it is', we tend to speak of 'what it is
not'. In case of performance as art, there is a tendency of distinguishing Performance
from Theatre, Dance or other 'Performing art' forms. Here emerges a broad
discourse on the relationship vis-à-vis contradictions between the performing
and the performance, entertaining and the subjective and so on. The issues
around spectatorship also spring up here.
Pillar 5
The Body as Body and beyond
For feminist artists in particular, using their body in live performance
proved effective in challenging historical representations of women, made
mostly by male artists for male patrons.[6]
The Body-
"as a measure of space, of identity and of narrative" remained so
central in performance art practices. In Indian case also, performance art has
been emerging with a note where the body remains a prime "tool of art
making". The inclination towards the “bodily presence” is the fifth
Pillar.
Elaborated
writings on these five pillars are to be updated in near future.
Samudra
Kajal Saikia
Biswanath
Chariali, Assam, April 01, 2014
[1] - Josette Fe’ral
[2] Philip Auslander, Going with the
Flow: Performance Art and Mass Culture, TDR The Drama Review, publish by MIT
Press, N.Y. University, Tisch School of Arts, Summer 1989, Edited by Rechard
Schechner. P. 119.
[3] Roselee Goldberg, Performance: Live
art since the 60s, Thames & Hudson
[4] RoseLee Goldberg.
Performance: Live art since the 60s, New York: Thames & Hudson, 1998, page
20.
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