I Feel So Far From Where I Am

I found Rahul Bhattacharya's post "Analogue: The Possibilities of Resistance" very compelling and thought provoking.  It is a given that issues of labour have always been politically problematic—both within and without the art world.  Now-a-days it seems that we no longer directly speak of labour, but rather, we cloak it in the rhetoric of time.  By this I mean that we often do not measure work in terms of the intensity of effort but rather in terms of duration.  I find this curious because time is an abstract concept and physical effort is decidedly concrete and palpable.  I was trying to figure out when this happened – when was it we began to deny the physicality of labour and favour the abstract supra-mundane world of the ticking clock?  Perhaps it is this sound that is the noise of which Rahul speaks in the above mentioned  post.  We have grown so accustomed to the measured tempo of our labour that we scarcely notice what it is that we are actually doing.  We are entranced and perform like automatons fulfilling small tasks in a world that has seductively reconfigured Taylorism as a way of being.  How did we get here – is there a way out? 

In 1776, Adam Smith notes if labour is divided or segmented the subsequent output (and profit) increases.  To illustrate this he uses the example of a pin-maker.  A solitary pin-maker, according to Smith, must go through many steps to produce a single straight pin: straighten the wire, sharpen one end and apply a small button on the other, etc.etc.  As a solitary task, the pin-maker can produce no more than 20 pins per day; yet, if this action is divided into 18 discrete tasks, completed by 18 different people then the productivity increases.  However, when the consumer looks at the pin in the shop there is no implicit residue of the labour required to create the pins.  There is no way to determine whether the pin was made by one or by many.[1]  The labouring bodies of those who painstakingly pieced together the humble pin are put under erasure. 

So if we extrapolate out from Smith’s (now somewhat antediluvian and utopic) treatise on the possibilities of particularized labour and apply it to the world of artistic production are we not faced with the same issue?  Labour is not implicit in artistic practice.  It is often difficult to apprehend the amount of labour required to produce a work of art.  Without a doubt the introduction of digital media into artistic practice has muddied the already opaque waters.  To be sure, the artist is the proprietor of the idea but the labour involved in the execution of the idea is often parceled out to others who have the technological know-how and access to the necessary equipment.  I see no issue with this practice as it is a logical outcome of the medium in the same way that the artist who paints no longer grinds and produces his/her pigments but instead goes to the shop to buy ready-made paints.  However, what is lacking is the sufficient means by which to theorize and understand the relationship between labour and art and what it means in the postmodern world.[2]  It seems that we have come full circle back to Smith’s example of the pin-maker – there is no way to tell whether one or many made a given work of art.

Without a doubt, the labour of the contemporary artist is entangled on so many levels but it seems to me that it always has been.  At least since the ateliers of the Renaissance or the Mughal courts, artistic production has often been the result of particularized labour.  I remain skeptical that a return to the tried and true analogue methods of artistic practice is the means by which to create a space of resistance, although the proposal is, in itself, quite radical.  I think the problem resides not at the level of practice but, as I said earlier, at the level of theory.  The artist need not change methods or mediums, rather we need to change our thinking.  We need to radicalize our understanding in order to create the mental spaces of resistance.  These spaces will lead to conversation and our conversations will lead to greater awareness and greater awareness will lead to real social change. 

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[1] Adam Smith,  An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, 1776 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, Electronic Classics Series Publication, 2005), 11-12.

[2] It is worth noting here that I use the designation of  “postmodern” with skepticism and suspicion as I remain personally and academically unconvinced that we are presently residing in an era in which the issues of the modern have been successfully resolved.
*http://theposssibilityofbeing.blogspot.in/2013/07/the-visibility-of-labour-in-post.html

Analogue; possibilities of resistance

As our taste became increasing fascinated flat polished surfaces, the cosmopolitan flatness of glass and steel; labor and the local became the biggest casualties.  The politics of digital aesthetics was such that 'contemporary' visual culture witnessed an absolute marginalization of local and labour (paralled by the dominance of global and mechanical) . Within the conventional Contemporary Indian Art production, the emphasis on manual/physical labour comes became a kind of noise, a disturbance which allegedly took away value the digital/conceptual art itself. This type of art which has come to dictate the art market for a long time emerged simultaneously with the global capitalism which swept the world two decades ago. 

Labour was sought to be omitted from the art and a clean, sterile, sophisticated, digitised practice which only projected the concept was developed. It is to the extent that the old media art practices refer to and embody forms of temporality, knowledge and subjectivity, which do not easily enter the concept of abstract labour of new media.

Contemporary art’s investment in labour, analogue* and old media assumes various forms and it is symptomatic of changes in the economy rather than expressive of a broader left consciousness in the arts. In other words, the rise of labour as a sign-reference in recent art does not amount to a political project, even if it indicates a departure from the staples of postmodernism and, in some quarters, the desire to provide an alternative to capitalist economic relations.

*please note, in this post and for our our show analouge is not technology, it is used in terms of taste and aesthetics. 

exhibition note

The Possibility of Being

Post digital* directions in contemporary image making.

The Possibility of Being is a curatorial engagement with five artist immersed in image making with a constant dialogue with Painting and Drawing both in terms of medium and practice.   The curation is dedicated to (re) exploring linkages between the image, the socio-political and painterly practices as we come to the end of an era which was (is being) called Contemporary.

Among the many developments that marks the term contemporary has been the dominating focus on content that prioritize socially and politically charged subject matters over stylistic experimentation and investigations over Form and Language. It is also marked by its affiliations to the idea of digital progress. As the digital (r)evolution settles down, we are in a position to understand that Digital is not just a technological shift, it is also an aesthetic trend. In an age where we are surrounded by digital technology, this splitting of the Digital allows us to explore beyond the aesthetic measures of purity, pristine images, perfect copies and powerful (spectacular) illusions.

Since the 1990’s postmodern culture and contemporary art was principally associated with photography, film, installation and text-based interventions. Painting lost its culturally privileged status and judged as an intrinsically conservative or reactionary aesthetic form. Post the onslaught of the digital (r)evolution, we reached a point where ‘Painting’ was declared dead as political and cultural agency; and it was only as a commodity that the relevancy of ‘Painting’ was acknowledged. This seeming fissure in history allows (forces) us to split Paintings in terms of medium and practice.  At the height of the digital age (As the neo liberal was defined and celebrated as the era of new media and the ‘futuristic’), we witnessed artists producing paintings that looked like digital prints (hyper realistic, no trace of artistic labour, smooth finished cosmopolitian flat surfaces). 

However, as we peaked inside the contemporary trend, silently inside artist studios we see a reassertion of analogue aesthetics. This return to analogue in a digital age has led to both painting and drawing have changing in terms of medium, concept, viewership and practice.

In a sense this curation becomes a project in cultural archaeology or ritual nostalgia. Slowly there is a growing recognition that painting practices continue to hold important contributing agency in shaping new cultural directions. These new directions in taste and cultural archaeological position disturb the meaning of ‘new media’ by opening doors for old media to stand as an vanguard act. That is why the Possibility of Being.For a post-1950s generation, such a ‘reconstruction’ of analogue aesthetics has lead recognition that painting practices today are contributing to new cultural directions.

Through the heights of the dominance of digital aesthetics in global taste, there have been artists who have worked within zones that transgress labour, concept and skill. Thus Painting (not as a medium but as practice) has emerged as an important platform for post-digital, post-conceptual art.

The 'durability' of post-conceptual art through the old media suggests that its practitioners have been re-fashioning and re-defining the medium with some of its earlier histories and aspirations in mind. Today, embedded in the practices of drawing and/or painting, we will find modernist understandings of medium, style, form and surface being re visited, but through the layers of post-modern theory and criticism. 

Two concerns that is integral to the curatorial thought.

•  Contemporary art’s investment in labour, analogue and old media assumes various forms and it is symptomatic of changes in the economy and taste rather than expressive of a broader left consciousness in the arts. In other words, the rise of labour as a sign-reference in recent art does not (necessarily)amount to a political project, even if it indicates a departure from the staples of postmodernism and, in some quarters, the desire to provide an alternative to capitalist economic relations.

• Within the conventional Contemporary Indian Art production, the emphasis on manual/physical labour comes up as a kind of noise, a disturbance which takes away from the digital/conceptual art itself. This type of art which has come to dictate the art market for a long time emerged simultaneously with the global capitalism which swept the world two decades ago. Labour was sought to be omitted from the art and a clean, sterile, sophisticated, digitised practice which only projected the concept was developed. It is to the extent that the old media art practices refer to and embody forms of temporality, knowledge and subjectivity, which do not easily enter the concept of abstract labour of new media.

The curatorial strands will be manifest in a show The Possibility of Being, bringing together Ashim Purokayasta, Jaganath Panda, Muktinath Mandal, Nataraj Sharma and Rekha Rodwittiya

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*Post-digital is a term which has recently come into use in the discourse of digital artistic practice. This term points significantly to our rapidly changed and changing relationships with digital technologies and art forms. It points to an attitude that is more concerned with being human, than with being digital. If one examines the textual paradigm of consensus, one is faced with a choice: either the "post-digital" society has intrinsic meaning, or it is contextualised into a paradigm of consensus that includes art as a totality. Either way, Roy Ascott has clearly demonstrated that the distinction between the digital and the "post-digital" is part of the economy of reality.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postdigital