Manush John - Control of the Void by Art in Transit

CONTROL OF THE

VOID MANUSH JOHN

INTRODUCTION

Diploma Project Documentation ‘Art in Transit’ 2014 Facilitators: Amitabh Kumar Agnishikha Choudhuri Arzu Mistry Samir Parker Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology

Bangalore was recently connected by the ‘Namma Metro’, now the metro seeks to form connections with its commuters. ‘Art in Transit’ is a public art project undertaken by the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology for the Bangalore Metro Rail Corporation (BMRC). The project aims to introduce interventions that can inculcate among passengers a sense of place that is not merely utilitarian. The following is a documentation of what I bring to this course and everything I have done within it since July 2014.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE PREOCCUPATION

DEVELOPING RESEARCH METHODS

WORK-IN-PROGRESS EXHIBITION

NEW DEVELOPMENTS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE PREOCCUPATION What follows is a prelude to this diploma, I hope it will lend you some insight into my preoccupation. During my four years at this institution I studied digital painting, digital sculpting, bronze casting, human anatomy, film, sound design and animation. I enrolled in many liberal art courses and received a Minor in Museology – Theory and Practice. A lot of the above have worked their way into this diploma.

A study of the cranium, the mandible and teeth

Studying skin compression

The images in this segment are my digital sculptures, sketches and photographs, they have aided in my understanding of the human body. These images should help illustrate a visual language that I am keen on furthering.

Écorché of the face, digitally reconstructed

Female torso Digital construction of my hand

An investigation of the Scapulo-humeral rhythm

THE BODY AS A LANGUAGE FORM The study of anatomy can exist independent of context; it is inherently truthful in that it is devoid of verbosity. By truthful I mean its knowledge is enmeshed within itself, one doesn’t question the authenticity of the body.

There is something about posture that is fundamentally clear: a kind of clarity that makes us intimate with the condition of people.

What is produced “artistically” on the other hand takes residence in white rooms, subject to the codified language of criticism. Here meaning is extrinsic to the work, decoded by a niche group of practitioners.

Public art making can be intimidating because my practice so far has always had me create work for individuals. By creating public art I am in some manner forcing a relationship with the public and the public is not an easily recognisable or satiable entity. 12

A session with a model

PRIVATE NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE PUBLIC I enrolled in a two semester graphic novel course headed by Alison Byrnes where I made my first engagements with the public through art. Inspired by Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip and The Illustrated London News, I sought to create my own fictitious renditions of the news I was reading. My book titled Reality: Rendition is a carefully curated compilation of over a 100 illustrations. Every image in that book is associated to an article from The Hindu or The Times of India and a part of that article can be found on the image. The collection of articles and images were intended to tease out a narrative that “illuminates” a modern

reality that I called fictitious. This venture proved to be inherently problematic as it dealt real people and their tragedies. To be the author of such meaning put me in the precarious position of telling my fiction convincingly and respectfully. The process of reading and rereading, of drawing and redrawing brought me closer to the content than I thought possible. I felt like I had drawn myself into a larger narrative. This engagement has authenticated some part of my relationship with art and the public and now I look to develop it. What you see on this spread are seven illustrations form my book.

Incest . Jaipur

Cat in a jar . China

Husband coerced into selling land . Bangalore

Passenger plane hits cow . Jakarta

Police violence against citizens . China

Child marriage . Saudi Arabia

Colonizing Mars . ‘Mars One’ 14

You will find that apart from the documentation, I have engaged with questions about the art practice, the use of the human body and its placement in a public site.

ART IN TRANSIT

DEVELOPING RESEARCH METHODS

As artists and designers, we have been tasked to create a “Namma Metro experience” that is not merely utilitarian. Our team consists of thirty seven students, headed by four facilitators. Some of our first engagements with space were done collectively. We were looking to develop methods of identifying the needs of the spaces we were occupying. Our tools and techniques we believed would inform us about the kind of interventions that could effectively occupy these sites. Our first site visit was to the active portion of the Purple Metro Line that spans from M.G. road to Baiyappanahalli. I was assigned to the M.G. Road station where I navigated the surrounding area with the intent to inhabit it. During my time on-site, sketches were made, photographs

taken and sounds recorded, all in an attempt to recreate the “experience” of the place. This was our method of engaging on-site without the physical occupation of site. At a later point I would design an intervention in response to my selected site. During one of my walks through the MG Road Boulevard I happened upon a group of school children huddled together making conversation. While staring at them I wondered how nice it would be if I could see more adults engage in this intimate manner, in public, oblivious to the rest of the world. I clicked a picture which made them get up, they were curious to see what I had taken. But the closer they got the more I began to retract. Pretending to

be busy I made a polite escape. There was something about the ambience, the loudness of the space and the jarring images on towering display boards that allowed me to be more indifferent towards strangers. Upon returning home I made a digital sculpture depicting a group of people being intimate with each other, something I beleive cannot exist in a site that is already barren to such display. Somewhere in my mind I wanted the viewers of this sculpture to sense this discord I had sensed at the site. I had hoped the contrast between intimacy and indifference would churn up something new in place of what is already present. The following image is a composite of my digital sculpture at its intended site.

Digital sculpture composited on photograph 22

MAPPING YELAHANKA This was a mapping exercise that we did around Yelahanka. We marked a twokilometre radius using the N2 Srishti campus as the converging point for all the segments. The brief was to map our segment of the pie in any manner that isn’t already used by Google Maps. I collaborated with Aditya Bharadwaj to map spaces of pleasure, inhibition and sound experience. The slice on your right is one of the 18 segments that were mapped by a group of 37 students, each using their own mapping tools. Our portion covered the dried up Attur Lake that was home to a pack of dogs. Black represents unexplored areas, yellow depicts the spaces of “inhibition” as these were dump sites for construction waste. Green were spaces that were pleasurable to be in and orange were spaces that were especially loud (sounds of dogs barking, construction work, traffic honking).

During the few hours I spent at the lake, I mapped wind direction, cloud movement, air traffic (there is a military air base nearby) and every sound that caught my attention. This exercise resonated with a lot of the mapping I had done of the human body. I had this urge to record everything I was seeing, hearing and feeling. Cartography, like the study of human anatomy, requires a continued engagement with the “site”, without which you are left with something incomplete and unusable. 25

EXPLORATIONS AROUND PEENYA This was our first visit to the Peenya station. We used this opportunity to take photographs and make sketches of our site. We were trying to understand the ambience of the station. The images on this spread are my digital paintings.

SOUND EXPLORATIONS I used a Zoom H4n to record sounds within the train as it travelled along the Green Line (Peenya Industry to Mantri Square). My intent was to collect objective sound data rather than relying entirely on my sense perceptions as I had done in Yelahanka. Having returned home, I played the recordings to listen for any oddities which might have gone unnoticed on-site. Here is some of that data: Upon arrival at a station the alarm beeps 15 times which is sustained over three seconds indicating the train doors are about to open. On average you have about 30 seconds to board the train before the next succession of 15 beeps begin, followed by a 0.5 second silence and 4 more successive beeps before the doors finally close.

This exercise made me wonder what chaos would look like in a place that is overly systematised. There is chaos that is evident and then there is chaos that works at a subliminal level. Identifying what is subliminal might allow for interesting interventions.

Journeying on the Bangalore Metro is comparable to a visit to the clinic. It only takes a few commutes on the Bangalore metro to sense the growing alienation commuters have to the space and the growing isolation that every guard embodies. Enter and you are subject to a system that scans you and your belongings and then ushers you along when you begin to linger in their space. An art inhabitation can only exist if one is allowed to meander. Sound encompasses the space without impeding upon the commuterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s passage. With this in mind I explored a few different ways we could introduce sound that would

be triggered by commuter presence. I put together a 3 minute soundtrack that would trigger when ambient noise peaked. This was a humorous piece that would allow the commuters to recognise and regulate their own volume. The soundtrack: Barely audible voices of a large group of people talking that gradually escalates till their noise is louder than the ambient noise. At this point the soundtrack has presumably captured the attention of the commuters. The voices quickly crossfade into the violent uproars between baboons, birds and other beasts of a forest followed by silence.

MAPPING SOUND AND LIGHT DATA AT YESHWANTHPUR INDUSTRIAL

This was our first mapping exercise at Peenya and this one I did in collaboration with Alok Utsav. We decided to devise a method to collect light and sound information objectively. Using a D-SLR and an android phone we geo-located each mapping site, recording sound in decibels and using the camera’s light sensor (-7 to +7) to measure ambient light. At each marker, we measured sound over a period of 60 seconds, followed by light intensity in the four directions (NE – SE – SW – NW) using a prime lens with a fixed aperture. We collected data from twenty locations around the Yeshwanthpur Industrial metro. A single experiment of this nature cannot yield any usable data. This was an opportunity for us to test our tools and develop methods for collecting light and sound data. When repeated over a few days and at different times within the day, it should give us insights that would allow us to build a very specific narrative pertaining to light and sound within that site. 30

MAPPING LIGHT FROM STREET LAMPS AND TRAFFIC HEADLAMPS Having taken a few long-exposure photographs at the Peenya metro station, Alok and I decided to enquire more thoroughly about the lighting at night. First we walked around the station taking note of the number of street lamps (including the ones that werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t working). Then we positioned ourselves to count the number of twowheelers, four-wheelers and pedestrians that passed us. We were trying to understand the density of light at night over a four hour period (20:00 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 00:00).

below depicts one of the eight images that make up the GIF. This is a map that illustrates the density of light over time. The process informed us about a particular aspect of Peenya that was unknown until then. We were now curious to see how this data or process would come into play with the work that was to follow.

The collection of light data at night can better inform us about the visibility of the station and its approachability at night. This data can aid in the design of new interventions that take advantage of the illumination at night.

We did this over three days so we could compare the data and make sure we had an average. The data was compiled onto a bar graph and then animated as a GIF. The cyan glow in the image

CROSSING THE THRESHOLD The human figure is able to convey one’s disposition without the requisite of a formal education. Body language in its various expressions is understood long before we are formally introduced to the other language forms. One can make use of this intrinsic knowledge to communicate to a public. Peenya, like every other metro station in this city, is guarded, monitored and clamped down with barriers that only alienate its stationary as well as transient occupants. The entryway of all metro stations and other guarded institutions have one thing in common: it necessitates the meeting of passenger and guard in the intimate crossing/ sharing of personal space. We are approached, patted down and spoken to before given entry. I call that space of entry a threshold, just like the yellow line at the platform that we are not allowed to cross. It is a liminal space that one recognises and willingly crosses. I hastily started work on a 6 x 4 foot mural for our exhibition that was scheduled to take place on the 27th of September at the Peenya station. The idea was to capture the commuter’s crossing of the threshold. The public that frequent guarded spaces have become accustomed to the encounter. I wondered if the form I had started work on would make this crossing evident. I wasn’t pleased with my design and I got lost in the technicality of its construction. It was later discarded. Artistic devices can tease deeply rooted habituations from our subconsciousness to our consciousness. I am also aware that those devices can obfuscate the enquiry through an improperly conceived intervention.

Digital sculpture created in Zbrush and rendered in Keyshot 34

A SCULPTURE FOR THE PUBLIC I have trained myself to design concepts in the form of digital sculpture and images but I have not ventured into materializing these designs for a public. I felt the need to try my hand at this before I committed to other public interventions. Jackson Porretta (Permaculture Designer and Educator) invited me to join him and his group of 2nd year Srishti students in the making of a human sculpture under the K.H. Road flyover. This project was financed by Jaaga in collaboration with the Goethe Institute as a part of a larger public art project called ‘Investment Zone’. Our site was positioned near a traffic signal, this meant that our audience was in a perpetual cycle of movement or stillness. I have to mention that the site had 36

already been inhabited with sculptures and murals, with a few of them being repurposed as urinals. What we created would have to survive this public. The sculpture we created was a seated female nude, pointing her index finger at commuters. The sculpture points at the person she is looking at and the person would hopefully feel her presence and her gaze. Our idea was to invite the viewer into a game of looking. When using the female body I often gravitate to what John Berger had to say about the depiction of women in art. Men survey women, women survey themselves. “The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.” Our concept could have been a

commentary on the archetypical gaze. In a follow-up mail with Jackson, he had this to say: The community rejected it because of its Raw femininity… They painted the breast White at first, which had me Laughing so hard about the skin colour thing, IRONIC way of censorship… Then they destroyed it to pieces…. The figure was positioned under a flyover in a rather dense part of Bangalore. The public responded to our concept by pulverising it. I am curious to know what people saw in the work. Had it really inspired eroticism? This, we believed, was a response to the figure more than it being an act of vandalism. Older works still remain at that very site and these works are not as provocative as our female nude. 37

MAKING MEANING

intended meaning, the work just became an object without meaning. Interestingly, soon after the work was installed a brick platform had to be created to prevent pedestrians from impaling themselves on the sculpture’s edges.

I read an article titled ‘Failure and the Potential for Redemption’, this article looked at three examples of failure when it comes to public art projects. The authors call it the “archetypical tales of what happens when public art goes wrong.” These examples refer to works commissioned in the 1970s and 1980s in America.

The amount of money it takes to introduce a work into public space means that the authority to do such a thing rest in the hands of the powerful. But more often than not it is the public that has to encounter and engage with these works. The article goes on to say that “abstract sculpture can be unappealing as public art because it is so often difficult to understand and contextualize.”

The Artists being referred to by this article took on public projects without the skills or the experience to understand site-specific needs. Recognising user behaviour and site is crucial when undertaking public art projects. In the aim to modernize a space, institutions naively commissioned artists to produce Modernist or Avant-Garde art. The idea then was to propel the space into a new domain of thought and action. These new works were commissioned without consideration to public opinion and with little regard to environmental briefs. One example would be Clement Meadmore’s sheet steel sculpture titled Open End, installed at Cincinnati’s Commerce Center. The sculpture can be described as an abstract geometric shape with sharp edges. The concept as the artist puts it was to build “a bridge between the scale of the pedestrians and that of the building.” With no real cues to suggest at this 38

Does the mere use of the human body

make a work more appealing, easier to understand and contextualize? Anthropomorphize a chair and we might be talking about the sedentary condition of modernized people, depict a human being inside a cube and we might still be making a reference to sedentary condition of modernized people. The plasticity of meaning in art has the propensity to make art, meaningless. But it is the plasticity of meaning that also redeems the artwork. Art allows us to recontextualize existing material so we can make new meanings when old ones fail to engage us. But in many ways we are conditioned to resist the new and revel in the old. Scott Eidelman talks about this in his paper ‘Bias in Favor of the Status Quo’.

Clement Meadmore’s Open End, installed at Cincinnati’s Commerce Center.

The principle rule of induction, Eidelman tells us, is that “we expect the future to be like the past. We effortlessly and unconsciously expect gravity to hold us to the ground every morning, we expect water to be wet, ice cream to be cold, that particle physics and brain surgery are difficult and cultivating dandelions is easy. The expectation of stability is critical; it is axiomatic. We expect stasis.” Meadmore’s sculpture titled Open End could be considered Post-Modern material churned out by Post-Modern requirement. Eidelman goes on to say, “as long as previous decisions are “good enough”, and energy-conserving organism in an uncertain world has little impetus to change.” But aren’t the developments of art periods (isms)

“responding” and “reacting” to the status quo? Is Meadmore the energyconserving organism creating PostModern abstract sculptures because Postmodernism brings with it a need to create abstract sculptures? Or is the public that organism with little impetus to change, unable to recognise the ingenuity in Meadmore’s Open End? Western Art for the longest time was purposed to work within social boundaries as a ritualistic service, reinforcing the identity of the authorities who commissioned the works. Walter Benjamin tells us, contemporary art changes this fundamentally by emancipating “the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” When works leave their intended circles through modern means of reproduction,

new meanings are attributed in place of old ones. Here we are talking about a fundamental turn that art has taken in the 20th century. We now live in the aftermath of that change and I find it difficult to pinpoint what that change might be. What is the requirement of our period, are there any conventions, and am I invariably bound to work within them? I don’t think there can be an answer to this question. We do often hail certain forms of art and we call them new, before they are triumphed by the next wave of new art. But aren’t new forms just the old being retitled or forgotten entirely? As an artist I have to recognise the conditions of my reality and try and effectively respond to them, which in itself is quite an undertaking.

PUBLIC AS ENTITY

I was introduced to Pierre Bourdieu during my search for reading material on public as an entity. In the book The Logic of Practice, Bourdieu talks about the habitus. The habitus, he says, is a product of history, where individual and collective practices produce more history in accordance with the schemes generated by history. “It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.” The text in the following comic uses excerpts from a chapter in the aforementioned book. I enjoy his writing on this matter, I am using the comic as an opportunity to present more of his work on the topic.

THE WORKS OF OTHER ARTISTS:

ANTONY GORMLEY: A MODEL OF HYPE?

ANTONY GORMLEY

Jonathan Jones, The Guardian Could it be that now the artist has fallen off the art world’s fashion hitlist, Gormley’s work can be seen as it is – quotidian and overrated

Since my introduction to his works back in 2008, I have raised him on a plinth of my own making. It was not until the compilation of this book that I actually started reading the literature that surrounds him. His works have been evident to me but not in a way that allowed me to articulate what was personally evident. Antony Gormley, Loris Cecchini (Artist, Italy) and Germano Celant, (Contemporary Art Historian, Italy) initiated a conversation with each other that was filmed at Art Basel in 2013. I will dwell on the contents of what Gormley said as it clicked with so much of what I carry in my mind. I will use this dialogue to initiate my own. There has been a logical progression in the evolution of art, the independence of 46

“It started with the lived moment of a particular body, a subjective experience of a particular body that has left some kind of evidence, some kind of forensic evidence, an indexical non symbolic nonrepresentational image that then hopefully is an empty space like a black hole in a context. It invites then the first hand physical experience of the viewer to project onto it.” This, he believes, is a radical change in the functionality of art.

art being a part of that progression. Here, he speaks of specific objects that have no reference to anything but themselves. He calls this “point zero”. I will refer to this term as it is an area of concern for me. Gormley begins by firmly telling us that the body he creates is not an object, but is a place of experience. He believes there is a need to replace the idea of the autonomy and the importance that is given to the object. And when we talk about narratives, it’s not the narrative represented in the work but it’s the narrative of the viewer going through the experience that is important to him.

Instead of it being pure formal beauty, or a representation of what might be considered beautiful, the viewer has to work in making something out of this, making meaning and attending to the experience of engaging with the work. At the moment, as an artist, I do not feel it is my right to intercede into the lives of others by giving them my meaning. What I do believe is that I can act as the agent that creates the circumstances through which people make their own meaning. I decided to bring in a few excerpts taken from a review published by The Guardian. It should shed light on the kind of criticism Gormley has received for his engagement with the body. There is no pleasing everybody.

Rumours reach me that people are just a bit, well, bored of Britain’s celebrated sculptor Antony Gormley, who is just opening yet another new exhibition at White Cube in south London. The tragedy of art today is that it is caught up in an empty fashion game that goes against the very nature of creativity, as artists are judged to be in or out, not for their merits, but their supposed buzzy immediacy. The truth is Gormley has always been overrated. I mean since the 1980s. He is a decent artist but has never been daring or original. His popularity comes from the fact that he makes modernlooking, cool, yet accessible images of the human form. These bland statues have an appeal at once “progressive” and “traditional”. They make the onlooker feel contemporary without feeling anxious. In reality they are deeply ordinary sculptures, that will look as uninteresting to later generations as statues of Queen Victoria look to us. Gormley has been raised to the level of great modern art because too many Britons have no idea what great modern art looks like.

RON MUECK - HYPERREALIST SCULPTOR Ron Mueck develops the body as an object which projects its own narrative; a narrative that is inscribed in the peculiarities of the figure. I find his use of proportions to be extremely effective in transforming or enhancing what is inherent to the body. “Mueck’s figures are marvels of verisimilitude.” - Drusilla Beyfus writes for The Telegraph. His figures are designed to convey something specific, hence the work is evident to the viewer. This is very different from what Gormley tries to develop through his figures. My own study of the body has, in the past, led me to create figures as autonomous objects, to be viewed and understood. But now I am compelled to develop the body as a site that can be appropriated and developed by the viewer. The upcoming exhibition at Peenya should allow me to test the effectiveness of this approach. 47

WORK-IN-PROGRESS EXHIBITION

This was our work-in-progress exhibition that would allow us to â&#x20AC;&#x153;testâ&#x20AC;? our interventions on-site. Here you will find me working against deadlines to generate ideas, create visualizations, and finally produce a physical, tangible object that would inhabit the site.

Concept: Spaces are constructed by people before other groups of people inhabit them. A reality so evident, it becomes easily forgettable. This sculpture intimates onlookers with the labourer and his labour.

I decided to work with an aesthetic Gormley had explored. By engaging with this particular style I believed I could better understand its limitations and strengths, and maybe it would inspire something new. I was curious to see if a work like this could be appropriated to the Peenya metro station.

of intimacy with the form I was creating. But I did find that the aesthetic was suited for the space, it seemed to hold well with the constructional aspect of my site. Size was the other issue. The metro is huge and it swallows anything that does not scale to its size. Monumental works work there, so do miniatures, as they draw attention to themselves. If I were working with life size figures, then repetition is crucial in capturing the commuterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s attention.

While making the digital sculpture I found that the aesthetic felt unfamiliar and unjustified and I couldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t develop any kind

When creating human figures for a public space like Peenya, I have to make sure that I do not inadvertently create something

FIRST EXPLORATION

offensive. Geometric abstractions that allude to the body might survive Peenya because the works do not evoke the sexuality of the figure, it is in fact almost devoid of sexual meaning. Meadmoreâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Open End was a design hazard more so than it was an ineffective piece of work. If people impale themselves on the edges of your sculpture, then that is what they remember, not the artistic truths that you might have tried to inspire. Minimize the potential for hazards, refrain from potentially offensive inhabitations, and the artefact just might survive. 51

SECOND EXPLORATION

BMRC opened their scrapyard to us two weeks before the exhibition. We were told that we could take what we find. The tank you see in these images was one of the many enclosed containers that we found. Alok and I were once again in dialogue with each other. We wondered what it would be like to create a microcosm within the metro station. Gormley talks about the body in relation to site: The condition of embodiment he calls the first body/skin and the condition of architecture - the second body/skin. Our habitat is a made one that we are attached to, built of corners and perfect edges. By controlling the second body, I believe that we could allow the viewer to re-experience his or her own embodiment (first body) in relation to our created second body. We wanted to create a space that would allow the viewer to observe his own movement and reactions within that space. To succeed at this, we needed to give the commuter a compelling reason to approach the artefact, then we needed a second element to suggest at an event. The evidence we left inside the container would just be clues to trigger the viewerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s own development of that given space. The viewer, as Gormley says, is left with a possibility. We spent a few hours moving within the container, sketching everything that came to mind. Unfortunately bureaucratic procedures kept us from taking what we found. Our designs could now only exist as concepts. 52

This image was inspired by the Russian nesting doll, also known as the matryoshka doll or the babushka doll. I am drawn to the concept of a container holding many different types of containers. If we call our own embodiment the first body and the architecture the second body, then what is the third body, and does one precede our own embodiment (first body)? A container like this could hold evidences of a lived moment, a moment that a viewer could relive. 56

LOOKING

EVOKING SIGHT

UPWARD

CONNECTING SPACES

THIRD EXPLORATION

This exhibition is an opportunity to take something that exists as a mere visualization and give it materiality and site. Every material exploration I have ever undertaken has been no larger than the size of my palm. The wonderful thing about working at this size is that it allows you to make modifications or even redo the entire piece if things don’t work out. Keeping these concerns in mind, I returned to Peenya looking to develop a new concept. The metro is treated as a site that needs to be traversed quickly. Apart from what it is, there is nothing else to do in the metro, so the commuter identifies the shortest possible journey to escape the site. The idea of this exhibition was to create an opportunity to delay one’s journey in a creative and enjoyable way. Commuters should be allowed to slow down and experience the place through the artefacts that occupy the site. The Peenya metro station is a gargantuan structure. The way it’s built hinders a person from appreciating its size, instead one just gets lost in it. On another note, commuters aren’t allowed to wander. The distance from the ground floor to the ceiling is about 70 feet, a distance unobstructed by walls, and something worth noticing.

Having spent a few hours just looking at commuter movement and observing the path of their gaze, it became evident that no one ever looked up. I had this sudden itch to make people look up, so I stood at my site for forty five minutes just looking up. I was absolutely still, I made no exaggerated body gestures except for the upward tilt of my head. The stationed guards were the first to notice, but they didn’t trouble me because we all knew each other. Unfortunately I was doing the experiment alone, so I could not tell if people were looking at me and then looking up to see what I was looking at. But standing there at that exact spot seemed like the most genuine thing I had done to validate my concept. I created a digital sculpture with a father figure and three children all standing at my site looking up. I believe that a group of people looking up would bring in a theatrical element to this space. This quite simply would be my working concept for the exhibition. The next step was to find a way to make a physical object that could occupy my site. I was introduced to a work where the artist wrapped his entire body in layers of cello tape before he cut himself out of the cast. The artist then sealed the cuts and continued to reinforce the body with more tape. I liked the aesthetic and it seemed doable and within my budget so I purchased enough tape in the hope to create at least five durable figures. What I thought would be a simple process turned into an ordeal.

When we look at people looking up, our natural instinct is to look up ourselves. 62

THE ORDEAL It is no easy task to cut oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s way out of a tightly wrapped plastic suit. Having escaped the cocoon with cuts and bruises to my skin, I decided to stick to the one figure I had created. This plastic skin I had emerged out of was not strong enough to stand upright, so I improvised and stuffed the entire body with balls of newspaper. This stuffing had an adverse effect on the figure, it made the volumes excessively stiff and sausagelike. I could have stopped work on the figure at this stage, but I felt the need to fix some of the problems that had sprouted up. The next thing I did was unnecessary and very expensive. I wrapped the entire body in fibreglass in the hope that its appearance would change. It did in a very unsatisfactory manner but now the figure was strengthened a thousand-fold. I used plaster to build the volumes of the 66

body back. Finally I captured my face impression in Aliginate and cast it in resin and attached it to the head. My idea was to establish a continuity of space that has gone unobserved, instead the sculpture I had created appeared to be in a state of self-serving reclusion. The human sculptures I had intended to create were supposed to be standing together, looking up. Due to certain unforeseen difficulties, time constraints and financial burdens I had to limit my intervention to just one figure. My eyes had to be closed while my face was being cast, the upward reach of the figureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s neck was not sufficient to create the upward gaze. I was disappointed with the object I was left with, but the series of bad decisions I had made in the days leading up to the exhibition left me with a degree of clarity about endeavours of this kind. 67

POST-EXHIBITION

The primary purpose of this exhibition was to invite potential funders to come see our artworks and proposals for Peenya. The funding was supposed to finance the creation of our designs and take it forward to completion. Due to certain unforeseen difficulties, we have not been able to gather the money required to see any of our proposals realized. In light of this, we have had to put all material explorations on hold and just develop our concepts and have them ready for such a time when the funding comes through. What follows are some of the new developments I have made since the exhibition, this book being one of them.

NEW DEVELOPMENTS PLANS TILL GRADUATION (DECEMBER 21ST)

Peenya is a largely industrial locality, however this is changing. The metro line brings with it apartments that sprout up violently like fungus on a fallen tree. What we once called the outer reaches of the city is now just more city. Those who enter the Peenya metro are surprisingly not the people working in the neighbouring industries. The industrial workers do not frequent the metro for these reasons: walking to the station is inconvenient, buses stop more frequently in places convenient to them, also the stations are huge and difficult to navigate, they are subject to precautionary measures like being scanned and having their belongings scanned while they are surveyed by guards and cameras for the duration of the journey. The place generally makes the industrial workers overly self-aware. This wasn’t too far removed from our own experience of the Bangalore metro.

Site is our first material says Gromley. The authoritarianism that is felt at the metro stations could be called the first material. This “material” will influence the way inhabitations are read within the station. Through my figures I find that I have responded to the first material. For the exhibition I sought to connect spaces within the metro by evoking sight. The tank explorations were an attempt to shed evidence on a lived moment of a particular body within the station. Now that I am nearing the end of this diploma project, I would like resolve some of the concepts I had started work on and pursue a few new ones keeping in mind everything I have done till now.

FIRST EXPLORATION REVISITED We are attached to our made habitat, buildings are the tangible traces of that habitat. I believe these built structures are a kind of evidence to our own treatment of ourselves. The figures in this visualization are living extensions of the architecture. This sculpture aims to dispense with the deadness of the building. The aesthetic I have explored here attempts to relate with the constructional nature of the metro stations. The sculpture would have more traces of itself carefully dispersed across the station. A work of this nature would invite the possibility for commuters to treat the walls as a living entity, and when they do, they would begin to look for more evidences of such life forms within the walls.

A work that can only be looked at from a distance will remain distant in every sense of the word. If people can walk around the work, climb it or even take shelter under it then they are more likely to remember the work. The gargantuan sculpture then becomes their gargantuan sculpture. At the moment there is nothing memorable at the metro stations other than the few sculptures that sprout up and then vanish. These are temporary habitations organised by The Rangoli Metro Art Center, an organization set up by the BMRC. R-MAC has expressed concerns regarding vandalism when it comes to exhibiting works at the metro stations, but I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see how such a thing would be possible when all the stations are populated by guards and other surveillance systems. This structure that I have proposed might also be too big to fall victim to malicious intent.

THE CONSTRUCTION

Described here is one of two methods that could be used to build these box figures. Using square steel pipes I can weld together the individual boxes needed to assemble the figure. These box frames would be covered by 6mm plywood boards that are bolted and secured to the inner metal frame. After this stage I can plaster the surface to get it to look like the wall it has emerged from. The structure should be a lot lighter than my full metal iterations that were done earlier. This method is also cheaper than constructing the entire figure in steel. The treatment of the material can be modified to look like metal among a variety of other materials. I believe a surface treatment identical to the wall would convey the â&#x20AC;&#x153;extensionâ&#x20AC;? more convincingly. Additionally, the entire sculpture could be made of 6 gauge steel sheets welded to make a box. These boxes can be assembled and welded together to arrive at the form seen in the visualizations.

Eidelman does say that mere exposure can increase the liking for something. It is not possible to test the effectiveness of time on a work until the work actually takes residence at a given site. This is one of the limitations of conceptual design. 76

BECOMING THE ‘SECOND SKIN’

Enter any of the metro stations and you will find guards stationed around every corner; they are there to help you navigate the enormity of the station. When Namma Metro opened its doors to the public, I found that it was the guards within the stations who claimed the site. I remember plotting my movement from guard to guard just to find my way around the station. Now that I am familiar with these spaces, my dependence on the guards have in some manner diminished. Their presence has taken on a new meaning. When I watch them now, I see silent rigid bodies in a semi-catatonic state, inhabiting an emptiness. These occupants have become living extensions of the building, habituated by a void. In Gormley’s words, “It started with the lived moment of a particular body...” Here the particular body undergoes a slow metamorphosis from his own embodiment to that of the building (‘second skin’). This representation is my response to a situational reality that I as a commuter quickly traverse. The sculpture is a testament to the relationship the guards bear with the void. I hope this inhabitation would allow people to recognise the void as I have recognised it through the guards.

METHOD

MATERIAL

I would first sculpt the figures in ‘Zbrush’ and then exported the geometry to ‘Autodesk 123D Make’. 123D Make is able to slice the digital objects in any desired axis, these slices can then be exported as paths that can be laser cut in a variety of materials. This method leaves little room for error as the form has already been established. The assembly would be relatively quick and more importantly it would stay true to the intended design.

Objects of all sizes can exist in a white cube because we are there to see them. Artworks that reside in spaces of transit have a good chance of going unnoticed. I would need to find a compromise between material, meaning and function to successfully exhibit a work at the metro station. Material can convey meaning. A surface treatment identical to the wall or the

floor can better communicate the metamorphosis between the two bodies. The laser cut slices have to be heavy enough to give the sculpture considerable weight, this should prevent commuters from inadvertently tipping it over. The skin of the sculpture would need to be covered in plaster to match the walls, or in granite that is identical to the floor. This inhabitation consists of five lifesize figures that camouflage with the materiality of the building. Dedicated lighting can draw attention to the object, but such attention could also separate the object from the building. This separation might detract from the intended meaning or it might create its own meaning. These issues with lighting can only be resolved post-assembly.

Exported paths ready to be laser cut 80

TO CONCLUDE

This course was my opportunity to ask questions that I carry with regard to the public art practice. I was able to explore site in a way I have never done before and engage with people who come from a background of such a practice. I have recognised certain modes of working that I need to shed and others that I need to develop. I am still very nervous about the idea of public art making, but it is this very feeling that makes me want to explore the practice even further. I have to thank all the people I have worked with and all those who have had to work with me. None of this would really be possible without their continued support, and for that I am grateful.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Documentaries/ Artist Talk:

“Making Space”, June 16 2013, Art Basel - Antony Gormley F for Fake (1973), Janus Film - Orson Welles Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), Paranoid Pictures – Banksy Ways of Seeing (1972), BBC films - John Berger

Books/ Articles/ Websites:

(1) Banksy, Wall and Piece, (2005), Century. (2) Jonathan Jones, “Antony Gormley: a model of hype?”, The Guardian, November 27, 2012 http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/nov/27/antony-gormley-model-of-hype

(3) Drusilla Beyfus, ‘Telegraph Magazine’, 29 July 2006, London/UK, pp. 20-25 (4) Antony Gormley, http://www.antonygormley.com/ (5) Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Structures, habitus, practices’, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, (1992) Stanford University Press, pp. 52-65 (6) Scott Eidelman, ‘Bias in Favor of the Status Quo’, Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/3 (2012) pp. 270–281 (7) Ronald Lee Fleming, ‘Failure and the Potential for Redemption’, The Art of Placemaking: Interpreting Community Through Public Art and Urban Design, London, (2007) (8) Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, (1936) 85

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Amitabh Kumar Arzu Mistry Samir Parker Agnishikha Choudhuri Alison Byrnes Jackson Porretta C.F. John Ruchika Nambiar Biswajith Manimaran Alok Utsav Meghna Saha Chaitra Shreeshaila Rebecca Vasant Anand