Notes from the grand tour-1

Abhijeet Tamhane

Venice, Münster and Kassel...after Art Basel (that lasted for less than a week,) these three destinations have been on the Grand Tour itinerary of Contemporary art. After visiting the 52nd Venice Biennale, 4th Sculpture Project at Münster and then being in Kassel for the 12th Documenta takes time and energy... on your last leg of the tour, you feel like it is an ordeal you must comply with.

This self-imposed ordeal is like the self-bondage that a Japanese director Hito Steyerl draws our senses to. In the film, a girl from Japan talks about her experience of being a bondage girl in club. Later, she decided to do self-bondage for the club audience. Now, she says, she feels uneasy without getting bondaged for a day. The thin lines between purpose, habituation and self-identification change from time to time, like in the case of Andrea, that Japanese girl. It´s true that a Mumbaiite can think of taking the Grand Tour of art only because it serves some purpose for her/him, but then you get off that
notion. you begin to take the experience as life.

Documenta, the much talked-about of all the three (and eventually criticised on procedural grounds like not having enough wall-texts or having too many old works), commands a keener attention. If you do not experience, you loose and then end up criticising. The five inter-linking exhibitions in Documenta are not at all linear. They go back and forth in time, ideas and concepts, and the total experience is that of a good conversation with somebody of the exact IQ and EQ level as yours!

The conversation might mean different things to different people. On one level, there is also a journey through textures of time, forms of protest, lines of self-adequacy, colour of culture and space of performance. Apart from these elementary elations, the central question of Documenta12 – " Is Modernity our Antiquity?" haunts the viewer. Not only because of the inclusion of works since 14th century to 1970s or 1980s, but also as some works that bear the 2007 date-stamp address issues of antiquity within. Arundhati Roy’s observation that India lives at once in many centuries, hold good (or better) in art. You see the Arab refugee camps, women from a north-eastern state of India or images of daily life from Africa and feel that modernity must have been intoxicated with a high dose of antiquity (pun unintended). The shock, if any, in Documenta 12, is not of modernity or post modernity. If you feel the shock, it refers to antiquity.

The ordeal of making sense out of what we see should continue, from different venues of Documenta, to may be Mumbai and New Delhi or Baroda/ Bangaluru or Khairagarh. That's what Documeta 12 has done it to you. You are now bondaged to art. No way to go except your senses and conceptual clarities.