Tetuan Dabaa Do- Strangulate It

Keeping Chintan Upadhyaya’s recent work titled ‘Tetuan Dabaa Do’ done at the Sandharbh Workshop in Parthapur, Rajasthan in focus, JohnyML looks at the concept of site specific art and asks whether the change of location facilitates change of meaning in a site specific work of art.

In our times, the trajectory of a work of art produced at the sanitized and secluded atmosphere of a studio space is quite predictable. The spaces of mediation like galleries, museums and collections have become acknowledged repositories of contemporary art. The interventionist approaches that the artists take in their respective works are sized and fashioned according to the demand and convenience of these repositories. The discursive residuals however remain outside these storages only to be revoked at times to validate the historical worth of a work of art. As if it were a historical irony, any art that stood against the subsuming tactics of the establishments, in due course of time got accommodated into the larger discourse of culture, which was authorized and legitimized by the very same establishments. Hence we see a twenty feet long log wood ‘found’ by Joseph Beuys at the Tate Modern, England. Or we see a cynical installation of Tracy Emin (her undergarments, used condoms and other private paraphernalia) in the Saatchi Collection.

If so, what would be the case of a site specific piece of art, especially when it is done with a missionary attitude? Does site specificity alone make it an ever resistant piece of art? Do the socio-political comments overtly seen in such works take away their aesthetic appeal and render them outside the acknowledged discourse of culture? Or simply relocating the same works within the sanitized spaces of mediation blunt their power of resistance? These questions become pertinent in a situation when the artists who operate within the mainstream gallery system slowly grow tired of it and go out to make site specific works that speak directly to the common people in a language that they understand best.

From the prompting aisles of the well lit platform of art history one side story cranes its neck out. A girl came to meet Pablo Picasso. After seeing his studio, she said: “I like all what you have done. But I don’t understand any bit of it.” Picasso, famous for his repartee was reported to have said: “There is one language called Chinese. You don’t know that either. To know anything written in Chinese, you need to know that language.” Picasso’s grand intentions are clear. To understand art, one needs to know the alphabets of art. If so, how would an artist trained in the contemporary ways of producing art create works for a rural populace, which is totally ignorant about a phenomenon called ‘contemporary art’?

Famous feminist activist and the editor of ‘Manushi’, Madhu Kishwar had once commented on the dress codes of the social workers. She observed that a social activist who went to spread awareness in shanty towns were looked down upon by the shanty dwellers because they knew from her dress code that this woman was not one among them. They were aware of the fact that by sun down she would go back to her urban comforts. Hence, according to Kishwar, a social activist who goes to the bastis should be wearing such clothes that would not generate a sense of alienation amongst the squatters. Artists who go to do site specific works in rural areas with the participation of the rural folk most often fail in conveying their ideas to the intended public mainly because of the feeling of alienation that they impart to the people in question. So they can take a cue from Kishwar’s observation: Do site specific works only where you are socially and culturally integrated. Then the works of art produced, however strong its political content is, function as a part of the socio-cultural and ideological structure of the particular society.