The Phantom Lady Strikes Again
The Phantom
Lady interviews Smitha Cariappa about the very successful performance art
festival she organized with Bar1 at Bangalore recently: LIVE ART 2011.
PERFORMING BODIES / THINKING BODIES
PL Smitha, the LIVE ART 2011 Bangalore
International Performance Festival you organized recently for Bar1 was so
ambitious in scale and thoughtful in conception, I have never seen anything
like it. It was part public performances, part workshop and part seminar, with
experienced international artists, young artists and students. We spent two
weeks together and became a community. I found an unusual intimacy, openness,
experimentation and spontaneity with a lot of discussion and analysis. Can you
talk about how it came about?
SC Performance
is like dope, you get hooked on to it! It started with my being a part of BAR1,
the Bangalore Artist Residency 1. We decided to stop our residency programme in
November last year and work on projects.
I have been thinking for a while that it was very important to document
and archive performance and to encourage students and performance art studies,
and the best way was to organize an international platform. You know that
Bangalore has also been a city where theatre and performing arts has had a long
history but the people here have not really understood performance art.
As an artist organizing the event, I wanted it to
be informal and intimate, and my target was the students and upcoming artists.
It had to make a change to the approach to performance art in the city. I invited artists who had made a big
difference in their own cities, like Dorothea Rust who created the Dawn to Dusk performance in Zurich and
Tamar Raban who is really responsible for the performance art scene in Israel
by creating the Performance Art Platform (PAP) in Tel Aviv. I had met Bandu
Manamperi and Janani Cooray at the Theertha Residency in Colombo. Janani who
works on critiquing the concept of “Beauty” was so constrained in Colombo, but
she was very relaxed and almost giggly here. I think it’s very male-dominated
in Colombo but she found so many women artists in LIVE ART. I wanted her to
meet Mangala because they are so similar in some ways, and finally they did a
performance together here.
Dorothea Rust and Monica Klingler curated the Swiss
section and invited Markus Goessi and Susann Wintsch, curator and editor of the
DVD magazine on contemporary art called TREIBSAND.
I found a book on Ratnabali Kant’s work in Suresh
Jayaram’s place (1Shanthiroad) and realized she was doing performance in the
mid 1980s and felt that her work had not been recognized, so I invited her for
the event. She had stopped doing performance in 2005.
PL I found so many elements of Ratnabali’s work
in young artists today- using installation and painting and sculpture in their
work, in the literariness and the direct feminist statement, and in using
traditional cultural material. One of the problems around her work was the lack
of context or discourse around it at the time, like the early videos of
Rameshwar Broota. They were like lone figures doing something before its time!
SC Usually
stars are invited for these events but I didn’t want to invite the regulars,
except Sushil Kumar (who tells me that he has been doing performance since the
1980s as well). I also wanted the invited participants to interact and stay for
all the fifteen days of the event to give back to the students and young
artists. This way the crowd doesn’t get dispersed after the performance and the
conversation keeps going. The invited artists can also get into the culture of
the place. In most international festivals the local artists just come for a
day and perform and don’t involve themselves in the whole festival.
PL I thought you had structured the event very well.
The first two days there were artist talks, the third day was the Dawn to Dusk performances all over the
busy roads between the artist spaces Bar1, 1Shanthiroad and Jaaga, and some
inside them. You were dressed like a sergeant major in army fatigues with a
LIVE ART 2011 umbrella, leading the people to the various spots. And there were
actions taking place on the flyover, under the flyover and medians, walking
across the roads and pavements in the traffic. It was great fun. The art
student Deepak’s performance on the flyover while painted half black and half
white was really spectacular. And sometimes the street performers also joined
in. The police and the shopkeepers and the petrol bunk people were so intrigued
that no one objected to the confusion! And then there was the intensive two-day
workshop after that by Dorothea Rust and Monica Klingler, where each one’s work
was analysed and critiqued, followed by loosening up exercises.
SC The
idea was to have the 15 November event first and then the workshop, because
seeing documentation is not experiential. The invited live art performances
were for five days after the workshop. Being an artist myself I wanted to give
everyone freedom to choose their time and space, so sometimes the schedule was
very loose!
Basically I’m an introvert. I can’t be with people
all the time. At the same time the Festival was a free go. Especially, the 15
November Dawn to Dusk 7 am to 7pm
almost non-stop performances was very interesting. The whole day was in the
open, on the public roads in the centre of Bangalore. I felt very comfortable
leading people to the sites, with the public crowding around. Being an
introvert you are suppressing yourself, but when the event happens you break
away all those walls and you create a sacred or structured space, and another
persona comes out. Something you would like to develop over a period of time
re-surfaces. Being an artist and organizer is difficult because as an artist
you need a lot of freedom, a bare minimum of restrictions, while as an
organizer you need to be more structured. In this I was being more of an artist
yet giving it a definite structure, rehearsed in my mind as I would do for my
own performance. In many ways LIVE ART 2011 is my conceptualized durational
performance lasting for over nine months.
PM The next five days of invited performances in
the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) and Venkatappa Art Gallery were
intense and also had their ups and downs. Artists chose their own sites and
times and worked with the elements on site - the favourite one in NGMA being
the pool! Or sometimes it was an indoor space like the white cube of the
Venkatappa Gallery. Vijay Shekhon and Manas Acharya actually worked with the
figure of K.Venkatappa and his collection there. Many artists improvised or did
several actions, doing collaborations towards the end with other artists or
students. The whole thing ended with two evenings of talks. And there were lots
of parties throughout!
SC It
was almost so certain and predictable that most artists prefer to perform in
the evening as they would anticipate a large crowd. Venkatappa Gallery has a
raw quality in its landscape, the very opposite of NGMA, and to have a museum
crowd strolling in without knowing what they are to see is interesting for
performance art.
At the NGMA, I was expecting more artists to
present their work. In fact when I introduced the space to them I took them
from the car park and backyard and much later approached the water body and
café space. Yet it fell into the more predictable site of NGMA near the water
body. I found Janani’s approach interesting as she laid out the braids she used
for her work on the café tables. I also liked the way Sahej Rahel used the all
round space of the NGMA venue, disappearing and re-appearing and working at the
favourite spot near the water body under the tree with charcoal. Monica’s idea of choosing the back yard of
Venkatappa Gallery, a rough space was so perfect in contrast to her
sophisticated flamingo-like movements. The confinement of the indoor space at
Venkatappa served well for video projections and vocal dialogues for the
performers. I had given artists complete freedom in their work. Tamar Raban’s
actions in the Archeological Museum courtyard matched very well with the pigeon
birdfeed and words spoken to melt/ drown in the traffic noise as she performed
with the “horn” in her pocket, followed by very subtle and almost hypnotic
gestures with the thread in her mouth and between her fingers.
PM The prelude to LIVE ART 2011 was the workshop
you organized with Pascal Grau in 2009 in Bangalore with the Chitra Kala
Parishad students.
SC In
2007 on my Swiss residency I got to know Pascal Grau and I was part of her
video performance where I had to play my maternal and paternal grandmother’s
roles and only with gestures! I found that Pascal had been Marina Abramovic’s
student and also her assistant. There was this myth that had been created
around Marina. I was very impressed by Marina’s book on the student body, which
was about her workshops and exercises with students and that’s how this whole
discourse started. Pascal was interested in doing her tableau vivant project in
Bangalore, which she had done earlier in Bolivia and Myanmar. So she was here
at Bar1 for twenty days and created a work after an old Mysore painting, Girija Kalyana with Chitra Kala Parishad
students. It was a sort of collaboration where I was the artistic director.
This was performed in the Government Arts and Science College library in
October 2009.
Since
I am untrained in Performance art myself, part of the idea of having the Live
Art Festival was to also have artists who have been academically trained in
Performance art exercises to conduct a workshop for students. Pascal’s approach
with the students was quite different from Dorothea and Monica’s approach,
because their background is from contemporary dance. In 2009 Pascal had worked
for five days with the students with Performance art exercises to tone and
prepare their bodies to maintain stillness for thirty minutes for her
production, which is easier for an individual but very demanding for a group!
The LIVE ART workshop was for two days, starting with an intense analysis of
the Dawn to Dusk performances of 15
November, and on the second day more about loosening up and letting go, very
playful.
PM
Why is there such a surge of interest in
performance art in Asian countries? Made
Surya was telling me that they have a group in Bali. Suresh Kumar Gopalreddy
says that he tells his students to do performance so that they don’t have to
depend on gallery shows and selling, and can keep on making art. He says he has
stopped doing sculpture because he doesn’t know what to do with his works, and
concentrates on performance. In contrast, according to Monica when she started in
the 1980s in Europe, performance was big and there were museum shows and
artists got paid well to perform. While now there is a lack of interest
institutionally and it’s basically small artist groups who meet.
SC There
are interesting things happening in Myanmar too where Moe Satt is the artistic
director of a group called Beyond
Pressure in Yangon (Rangoon) and the two Myanmar artists who came, Aung
Myatt and Ma Ei are from there.
However, some statements made about getting into
performance art may sound too light, in most cases. It is necessary to
understand ‘body aesthetics’ and then the quality of material and expense
involved. It is a mistake to believe performance art does not have a market! In
Bangalore people started doing it as a public event. It was about creating the
observer and the observed. In the Bangalore Habba of 2003, a public city
festival, some of us did some performances. Though sometimes things are done
too casually here and I’m very doubtful about it. We got a chance to see some
work in the Mysore Khoj in 2002 where there was this performance artist Michael
Tuffery from New Zealand. And we have these alternate spaces like Bar1 or
1Shanthiroad which have young artists and students helping out by which they
meet artists and learn. These spaces become open classrooms, open to artists to
develop skills in art events and art administration in a practical way.
PM The beginnings of performance art in America
was in the 1960s and ‘70s at the time of the Vietnam war protests, the civil
rights movement, the Women’s Movement and Flower Power. You can see the
politics deeply embedded in the Kashmiri artist Sushil Kumar’s work, which is
sharp and violent – as when he wore that old commode he found on his head and
walked around at the Dawn to Dusk, or
when he was dragged around naked in Venkatappa gallery. You invited artists
from Israel, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. Performance art in Sri Lanka has come out
of the troubled situation there, Bandu’s act of breaking a thousand eggs with
his hands and then putting his head inside a sewer drain, was powerful.
SC Tamar Raban invited me to Israel for the ZAZ Festival in 2010 and I
did a performance called Body Line. I
lie at the entrance and exit of a busy bus station, so I’m obstructing the flow
of passers by at the evening peak hour. Those who are curious come and stand
around me. There are bags of flour near me and a sign saying in English and
Hebrew ‘Sieve the flour on the body’ so the flour is sieved over me. I lay for
one and a half hours in stillness. Soldiers were passing by and I could smell
their boots. The circle around me which was five feet away came closer and
closer. Some people were very gentle while one person threw a whole bag of
flour on me violently. An orthodox Jew who was standing nearby kept shouting
that I was Satan! My passiveness was very irritating to people. So sometimes passiveness can be very
aggressive! Just like silence can be
noise.
PM Well, Gandhi used passiveness as a political
tool very well! We had an interesting
discussion about Marina Abramovic’s
retrospective at the MOMA New York. The Europeans made faces and said they were
no longer interested in her, and her performances now are not convincing. There
was this controversy about her students replaying her old performances in the
show, with plastic bones used instead of real ones. But I found the notion of a
‘retrospective’ of performances and of the copy and the bad copy interesting,
so did the Swiss curator Susann Wintsch. It’s like reproductions of paintings
circulating.
SC I
feel a bit queasy in the stomach hearing about plastic bones!
Performance is very spontaneous. There is no
rehearsal, though it may be done in the mind. Even if one uses video
projections, something is picked up and improvised. The performer has to be
sensitive to the vibes from the audience, at the same time you shouldn’t get
carried away and overdo things.
The Phantom Lady
December 2011
LIVE ART 2011
Bangalore
November 11-25
2011
www.bar1.org
facebook: LIVE
ART 2011 Bangalore (updated)
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