|
(United) Nations Ltd.
N.S.Harsha recently presented his installation titled ‘Nations’ at the Shanghai Art Fair. Taking critical notions from traditional and contemporary theories, the artist in this work engages the viewers with his anti-imperialistic thoughts, says JohnyML.
N.S.Harsha |
“The siren of the ship blows
It is time to leave the dock
When the depths scream out
Life stands alone on the iron plank
And the sea winds tear off our
Meaningless flags.”
- Balachandran Chullikkadu
|
N.S.Harsha’s work at the Shanghai Art Fair 2007 is titled ‘Nations’. And the work is a composite installation of (192) sewing machines fitted with the official (national) flags of 192 nations that are members to the United Nations. On the wall, in the typical repetitive style of the artist, three panels show the same sewing machines and flags painted in their diminutive stature. Threads from the sewing machines (these machines comes from the same brand, curiously named ‘Flying Man’ and the inscriptions are both in English and Mandarin) move out of their stacks and bobbins as if they have their own life and make a web that impedes the onlooker from moving into the corridors of their assembly line arrangement. ‘Cut pieces’ of the flags are strewn all over the floor and the flags painted with acrylic on thick fabric expose their unpainted underside, which one critic cites as the ‘the core sameness of humanity underneath its diversity.’
The closing lines of a poem that I quoted above deal with more or less the same situation. An ‘imagined’ one night stand with the poet and a French girl eventually results in their separation. Somewhere he says, “I am white, you are brown, but look our shadows are black.” Now it is the time to separate. And the sea winds tear off the meaningless flags of the two national identities. This is a romantic vision. Then art is about romantic visions. Harsha in his works envisions a world that is divided by meaningless flags despite our claims on globalization. Under the beautiful carpet of the global politics and culture, nations are still divided amongst socio-cultural, economic and ethnic lines. Globalization brings forth the issue of migration, immigration, outsourcing of cheap labor and the curtailing of the individual freedom for the greater causes of global market economy. Here we are left with nothing but the romantic notions of unity in diversity, where all are connected by the differently colored threads. Or are we separated by our different colors that disallow the entry into the other’s mind and body?
Harsha’s is a world infested by human beings doing various acts. His previous works showed how people eat, marry and do many other ritualistic things while sitting in a row. Though they seem to be doing the same act, Harsha invests each person with individuality that cannot be challenged by any extraneous effort to steamroll them into a uniform entity. He has always forwarded a critique of the imperial encroachments into the virgin areas of less aggressive societies. In a series of plant drawings, intricately made and expanded to the verge of abstraction, the artist had raised the issue of acquiring ethnic knowledge systems of the alien cultures (alien to the imperial forces) through taxonomical arrangement of the flora and fauna. In a public art work that he presented during the Kala Ghoda Festival, Mumbai 2007, he covered a fighter aircraft with Khadi, which has by now become the universal symbol of self reliance, passive resistance and an antidote to the alienating industrialization. Around the same aircraft, Harsha placed innumerable number of canvas pieces painted with the images of sleeping men and there was an open invitation to step on them while aesthetically scrutinizing the fighter jet or while deriving pleasure from the spectacular-ness of the Khadi clad phallic symbol of any aggressive nation.
Romantic vision of a livable world, though articulated through post-modern means has become the pivotal theme for most of the artists all over the world. But this romantic vision, unlike in the last centuries, is not about conjuring up a utopia. It deals the vision through inversions that brings for the scenes from dystopias. Overstatements, as in the theory of spectacle, play the role of a critique of the socio-economic and politico-cultural fantasies that make the world unlivable. In the romantic world of visions, things could have been spectacular, larger than life and at the same time contained in the heavenly visions. Understatements would have served the purpose. But in the dystopic visions, one has to resort to exaggerations and repetitions. Perhaps, one larger than life sewing machine, sculpturally and culturally placed and a carpet of national flags (Harsha had reworked a carpet with his repertoire of images during late 1990s when he participated in one of the Khoj Workshop held at Modi Nagar, Uttar Pradesh) would have done the job. However, the artist’s insistence on the repetition, perhaps a style statement derived from experiential realities, makes the issue more pertinent and invites the viewer into the core of the issues that he would like to discuss/debate/represent in his work.
Politics, history of politics, mythology, folklore, history of industrialization, world war waged during the first half of the last century, the neo-imperialist strategies of global aggression, shift of world economy from its industrial base to knowledge and communication base etc are evoked in ‘Nations’. In the national struggle for independence of India, clothes played a pivotal and emblematic role. During the early periods of colonization cloth making sector was one of the areas that the colonizers chose to suppress in order to curb the native economy. In India, the myths of political struggle show how the British cut the thumbs of the weavers in West Bengal and other northern parts of India not only to kill their economy but also to kill a fantastic tradition of hand weaving. The entry of Mahatma Gandhi into the national political struggle of pre-independence India, brought back the attention to clothes. Gandhiji asked the Indian populace to eschew the foreign clothes imported from Manchester, the hub of the British fabric Industry for destabilizing the economic upper hand of the colonizers over the struggling Indians. Gandhiji not only used fabric as a political weapon but also as a potential cultural symbol that raised massive political sympathy for the strugglers.
Harsha’s art comes from a tradition of struggles and a romantic vision of about a purely humanitarian world, a vision shared by the stalwarts like Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Charlie Chaplin, George Bernard Shaw, Carl Marx and Frederic Engels (to name a few). They brought an oppositional view of the industrial world through simple and symbolic narratives most of the time laced with fun. Gandhiji’s insistence on wearing simple clothes was a part of this fun (of which Sarojini Naidu commented once that India needed to spend a lot of money to keep Gandhiji in his frugal attire). Chaplin’s montaging of a flock of sheep with the bowler hats of the factory goers in Modern Times was another part of this fun. What Marx and Engles theorized, Chaplin and Gandhiji visualized in their politico-cultural projects. Shaw and Ibsen dramatized it through colossal figures fighting against a corrupt system and lampooning at the apple carts that would be toppled by the political will of the people.
The tradition, though not a very lucrative term in the discussion of a work of art produced during the late capitalist times, of a country(of all countries that try to stand firm on their native grounds against the onslaught of the global economic aggression) is what makes ‘Nations’ an engaging work of art. This work in one go, like a whirlwind takes along all what comes on its way; right from the UN Membership (class hierarchy within this world forum), failing job ratios, sweatshops pushed into hinterlands of cheap labor, human beings divided by meaningless nationalities etc. For Harsha, a person hailing from Mysore, an aspiring hub of IT industry in India and also a person who has worked in the IT industry during mid 1990s (a time that was still grappling with the changing realities of the national economy), outsourcing of cheap labor, assembly line work places (in call centers the assembly line with young, chirpy professionals is called ‘bay’) and unearthly times of working (a replication of ‘shift duty’ from the industrial times) etc are lived realities. However, he does not fall for the fleeting images of such places.
Harsha anchors his ‘Nations’ in the deep waters of tradition, which could be understood not only through a universal symbolism but also through the registrations of history. I would not try to generate a narrative out of this work of Harsha as it resists narrative to a greater extent. Attempts have been made by some critics to read it as the plight of the workers (sweatshop laborers) who are temporarily away from their worksite. On the contrary I would prefer to place the work as a symbolic resistance a la Mahatma Gandhi, against the one-sided narrative of the imperial forces. This installation as a whole looks celebratory, but a closer look reveals that possible ways of celebration are countered with numerable questions ranging from the historical to the political. Harsha’s is a cultural statement of passive resistance, which is what an artist is capable of in the times of round the clock co-optation of rebellions. ‘Nations’ exemplifies the not what the cultural imitates political but what political imitates the cultural. And the impossibilities of erasing what have been done. |
