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From Monuments to Traces

Monuments are inscribed with the narratives of victory, heroism, nationalism, loss and pain. Should there be more monuments erected only to be vandalized and re-inscribed by the narratives of an explosively corporitized society? Tushar Joag in his latest solo show at the Chemould Prescott, Mumbai, though does not provide the viewer with definite answers, raises a few questions and imagines monuments as debris through subversive visual symbolism, says Amrita Gupta Sing.

National festivals, military parades, and patriotic memorials, erection of statues of mythological and heroic symbolisms; such public events and tributes naturally bring to mind the idea of nationalism. But what is the cultural logic behind them? Monuments immortalize our heroes, celebrate our accomplishments, and mourn our losses. The past is often as unpredictable as the future, and public monuments and symbols reflect this unpredictability. Created as an ideal self-representation of a nation and its supposedly shared values, they are nevertheless contested and reinterpreted by various political, social, ethnic, and other forces involved in various memory and legacy wars so conspicuous in our time. Further global history is a cauldron of conflicts, protests, riots and pogroms, fuelled by a worldwide threat of terrorism against the West and also ethnic and religious wars. These events fit into a global pattern of the rise and fall of societies, and the collating representations of the political usage of public monuments in such a scenario. The all-consuming role of media has also given rise to the culture of sensationalism and commodification. Social and political conflicts are increasingly played out on the screens of media culture, which display spectacles such as sensational murder cases, terrorist bombings, celebrity and political sex scandals, and the explosive violence of everyday life.

Tushar Joag's latest presentation ‘Reconciliation and Truth’, at the Chemould Prescott Road, precisely deals with the dimensions of cultural memory vis-à-vis public monuments. Does one need such monuments to be symbolically inscribed in public spaces? And given the violent erasures of several such monuments and icons in recent history, what use could these edifices have in both public memory and space? Razing of monuments is also about power and shifts in democratic patterns, while maintaining them at mammoth costs puts tremendous pressure on the State exchequer. These repositories of cultural symbolisms only become targets of public vandalism. Joag, via his research at his single-person fictional corporate enterprise, UNICELL: Public Works Cell (formed as a subversive jab at the disreputable Public Works Department) suggests measures to ‘do away with violent temptations’ via the construction of all future monuments to be created as debris, devoid any classificatory markers of any particular religion, culture or people. Further, these should be installed in special zones, far away from societies and nations, in inaccessible spaces of deserts and islands.

Joag started UNICELL as an extension to Open Circle, an artists' initiative co-founded by him. As part of Open Circle, he organized various public actions, interventions and amateur activism. The experience raised several questions in him regarding the role of art, creativity and society. "For almost two years, I stopped making any art. I went through a predicament as to what business art had to exist at all, what use was it to society? I thought art was not enough, not even if its subject matter was explicitly political - one had to aesthetise politics, not just politicise aesthetics." This internal turbulence gave birth to UNICELL-PWC, and after several projects which had the artist making several public interventions in Bombay, this imaginary corporate entity has devised a central administrative body ‘International Department of Monuments and Edifices’ and his latest exhibition presents schematic models and visionary drawings to explicate his concept.

The exhibition contains drawings, sculptural installations, architectural frameworks and a video, the gallery designed as an amphitheatre placing it within the conceptual parameters of the Situationist International (SI), which envisions modern capitalist society as an organization of spectacles: a frozen moment of history in which it is impossible to experience real life or actively participate in the construction of the lived world. People are spectators of their own lives, and even the most personal gestures are experienced at one remove, so these various violent acts, such as assassination of Gandhi, the blasting of the Bamiyan Buddha, the 9/11 debacle, the Babri Masjid demolition, the Godhra carnage, the Bombay blasts, the Middle East crisis and the neo-imperialist designs of the First world, act as only surface tensions on our everyday lives. In the video, the artist appears nude (in three selves) on the Asokan pillar, an emblem of the nation, while spitting fire and bullets, acting out a historical memory of the assassination of Gandhi by Nathuram Godse, while images morph into blasted architectural sites that often recall images of Beirut or Palestine. It is a compelling video, with layers of violent acts that marks the human condition. A plane blasts into a part of the Buddha, while regimes fall (the Soviet Union/The Iron Curtain), a twin tower precariously balances on the wing of a plane, while charred architectural remains, and equipment to extract crude oil interact with the dialogues taking place in the drawings, the rhetoric offered by various members of UNICELL, including the artist. Various historical happenings, across geographical boundaries and time, are squeezed together in one space, under the over-arching theme of violence and xenophobic nationalism. Violent sounds freeze into words, as found in comic books, while Buddha’s image gets resolutely blasted in each drawing.

What is our choice, suicide, revolution or boredom?  While we flee, we pick up weapons, killing neighbours in mobs, set fire to monuments, razing histories to the ground. Joag, via the title, ‘Reconciliation and Truth’ makes an oblique reference to the Truth and Reconciliation Committee (TRC) set up in South Africa in the official after-math of the Apartheid. Anybody who felt he or she had been a victim of violence could come forward and be heard at the TRC. Perpetrators of violence could also give testimony and request amnesty from prosecution. Each little history was to be heard out, each monument preserved. While Joag promotes the idea of building monuments of debris to avoid violence acts, he also calls for justice and fair access to human rights that the TRC propagated. The Bamiyan Buddha deserved to be where it was, as did the Babri Masjid and various other little monuments that were erased during the Godhra carnage. Do we have the time to listen, sit back and think of the civilizational and pluralistic dialogues that make up our modern society, or do we look continue to live in a world of fallen heroes, in an increasingly militarized world of blasts and bombings? Joag doesn’t provide answers, but via symbolic and subversive signs, he sure asks questions of what is left humane in each of us, in a time of the vanishing principles of humanism.