'Mirage' by N.S.Harsha. Details, Various Views
A mirage of monumentality
Abhijeet Tamhane, in his characteristic style analyses the ‘butterfly effects’ of the monumental work ‘Mirage’ by N.S.Harsha done for the Kala Ghoda Festival, Mumbai.
N.S.Harsha |
Mirage, translated in Hindi as 'Mrigtrishna', was N. S. Harsha's exhibit for the Kala Ghoda Arts Festival, Mumbai (KGAF). A life-sized model of 'Mirage 2000', clad in Khadi cloth, sat over a platform of some more than 50 canvases showing sleeping figures. The installation changed the usual views of the public place: a triangular traffic island, aptly called 'trisland' by the poet Arun Kolatkar in the opening poem of his book, 'Kala Ghoda Poems'.
The presence of this fighter aircraft was rather calm. Visually, it was not frightening and hence lacked the awe inherent in a fighter-aircraft. The snow-white Khadi cloth, with ample sunlight, played an ironing trick on the object, and straightened its curves. The many visitors, who took pictures standing alongside the 'plane', admired its monumental presence and nothing else. They might not be thinking of the aircraft that is credited for the exceptionally effective air strike during the Kargil War, 1999. While they went close to the aircraft, on the platform, they saw the sleeping figures, but since there was no harm in standing on the sparsely painted canvases, visitors did not bother the presence of these human figures right under their feet.
The politics of Harsha's work started here. While the 50-odd sleeping
figures had a potential to look spectacular, Harsha moved the
spectacle elsewhere. After a second look, the sleeping human figures
on a canvas, a bit of Harsha's signature figures, invoked their apathy
to the hustle-bustle and retained their innocence. The figures told
stories of small-towners reclusing in busy public places of a metro,
of boys made to sleep by their grannies. The canvases also showed some
teenage girls, who as if abided by teachings received from their
mothers and aunts on how to look well-behaved while sleeping, or some
others whose dreams might have been so innocent that they would be
forgotten while awake. A fighter aircraft clad in Khadi that had no
apparent signs of its killing capabilities stood on those private
stories.
The notion of privacy in the act of sleeping was broken apart by the
monumental presence of the aircraft. The public feelings, those more
akin to the media hypes, seemed to win. A brilliant text (by the
Paris-based art-historian Deepak Ananth) placed on one side of this
public installation, provoked its reader to look at the exhibit as a
'Temporary Monument' with all its contradictions. And yet, there were
people who took off their own 'five seconds of fame' with getting
photographed with the 'white plane'.
There were hundreds of those initiated art-viewers, though, who
thoughtfully read the curatorial note and looked at Harsha's drawings.
But what made a unique audience for this site-specific work where
'commoners' who photographed the work, even by their cellphone
cameras, with same awe and delight as Mahishasura on the Chamundi
hills (incidentally, Harsha had once told that the road leading to
Chamindi Hills, Mysore had been one of the first places where he drew
sleeping figures) The office-going Mumbaikars and Mumbai-Darshan
audiences alike, befriended the fighter-aircraft by touching it, got
amused by its Khadi tactility, and then decided it was something
important, something to be remembered and memorized. They simply did
not know of Harsha's success-story or his frequent-flyer status. They
also did not know how the artist draws home the tensions between
native and global. What they knew was the moment of seeing something
eyeful!
Can it be called apathy towards suggestion that gives proclamations a
clean sweep? Harsha's work, and a close observation of the kind of
response it got during the two weeks of its installed life, posed some
odd questions: not about militarism, not about the Khadi symbolism and
its contradictions and neither about the innocence of sleepers, but
about the mirage of monumentality! Size, placement, contradictions
with the site (that accounted at least for a surprise element) and
accessibility, all made Harsha's 'Mirage' an object of – of
celebration! While celebratory mood was somewhat expected in the Kala
Ghoda Festival, Harsha's work confronted it and pointed to a greater
problematique of the spectacles and monumental scales in the days of
media hype, and in a world where consumerist ethos makes you believe
'every day is a celebration'.
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