Is a brick art? Is the brickmaker an artist?

Conceptualised first for the Students’ Biennale in Kochi in 2016-17, the unusual and moving ‘Archiving Labour’ exhibition recently came to Chennai for a week-long showing

May 05, 2018 06:14 pm | Updated 08:40 pm IST

An inscribed brick discovered on the premises of Chennai’s College of Fine Arts.

An inscribed brick discovered on the premises of Chennai’s College of Fine Arts.

‘Archiving Labour’ was a modest exhibition; its scale moderate, its pieces grave, its venue quiet. Even the handwritten descriptions and declarations on ruled paper that fluttered quietly on the walls were beautiful and earnest.

As an anthropologist of labour, I was excited most by the show’s willingness to be indignant at the rapid disappearance of the labouring body and forms of work from public discourse and visibility. The artists on show had close blood and community relationships with labour; they were children, grandchildren, apprentices and, indeed, living legacies of labouring bodies.

As I chatted with the curator, C.P. Krishnapriya, a practising artist herself, about her first curatorial outing, I was struck most by her clarity of vision as well as by the relentless and located politics that lay behind the living archive. Beginning with the question of “What is art,” the exhibition took one through an object tour centred on the precarity of this question and the fine lines between craft, art, work and subsistence.

Dignity of labour

Conceptualised first for the Students’ Biennale in Kochi in 2016-17, the unusual and moving exhibition recently came to Chennai for a week-long showing. The Students’ Biennale gives students of government arts colleges a platform alongside the main biennale. ‘Archiving Labour’ involved 33 artists from the Colleges of Fine Arts in Chennai and Kumbakonam.

Five of them, A. Thalamuthu, A. Kameshwaran, M. Sinduja, K. Padmapriya, and V. Saran Raj, formed the core group and, along with the others, conceptualised, brainstormed, and experimented with research, production and media to put together what was an extremely self-aware set of object experiences. Krishnapriya was compelled by the framework provided by a history of the present, so to speak, of Chennai’s College of Fine Arts and its industrial roots.

She spoke of art popularly seen as being produced in isolation from society — in silos that can afford reflexivity and thought. And she conceived of this exhibition to juxtapose such a notion against the everyday reality of the students who inhabit arts colleges.

Flocking here from a varied set of caste and class backgrounds, and often battling enormous odds to be able to gain an art education, the bunch of students thought of asking what kind of art may sufficiently represent their lives and the lives of those around them. This question was one of the important motivating forces behind the exhibition.

Further, even as large numbers of students enter the college with some idea of what their future as artists might portend, most end up being absorbed into the surrounding economy, in software, film or publishing industries, where their jobs are only peripherally about art.

In this instance, art also becomes about work and labour, and seems far removed from neoliberal promises of transcontinental fame and ten-figure bids. At the same time, the experience of art education itself does not provide the tools to bridge this distance.

This lack is something Krishnapriya had herself felt as a student, she says, knowing nothing about art as located within a larger universe of artists and artistic thought as evoked by interlocutors and conversationalists. She was, therefore, compelled by a need to reinvent the classroom and orient her curatorial practices towards producing alternative spaces that might transform and discomfort the artist.

Art as oral history

Acting as a formal provocation was also the sealed archival museum on the college premises, and the artists played with an imagined idea of what might be housed behind those barred doors. The exhibition also sought to critique the very idea of a museum and the sacrosanct nature of objects set aside as deserving of being archived and museumised.

The central nerve of ‘Archiving Labour’ thus became about oral history, living stories, and beating, throbbing, working body parts. It was also insistent that art is not a passive object to be consumed, but an active engagement, produced at the moment of encounter.

Beginning in empathy towards themselves and their communities, Krishnapriya spoke of the artists’ own transformation in the process, even as they went back and forth about whether their productions could be called art.

As I walked around the exhibition, I counted off on my fingers a large terracotta brick that opened up like a book and had within it an album on brickmaking; re-orchestrated portraits that mimicked the colonial archives of photographs of “natives” in various poses of work or leisure; photographs that documented the process of making bronze lamps; sketches of lined faces; and even six little vials of sweat, collected as some of the artists laboured over their pieces.

Also running on loop was a video with a triptych of a beggar, a politician, and a man who earns money from staying still as a statue. A pair of headphones relayed an opari or dirge by a woman called Paramai, a professional mourner.

The show was also unwittingly a testimony to the disaggregated body, a nail here, a hand there, and somewhere else, the spectre of backs permanently bent over but not quite supine. For an exhibition located in the socialist politics of labour, it became also a timely contribution to the present economy and its contradictions.

The Marina sculpture

The famous ‘Triumph of Labour’, created by the sculptor and once principal of these students’ alma mater, Debi Prasad Roy Chowdhury, loomed large, but I was compelled least by it. Reimaginings of the piece called for workers of the world to “relax”; inserted a British overseer behind them; a man resting below them.

And yet, I was moved by precisely these responses, which affirmed today as they did in 1959 (when the sculpture was erected on Chennai’s Marina Beach), that labour is at the heart of the questions that continue to matter, even as everyday processes and discourses work so hard to efface it.

Visitors to the Chennai show were greeted first by a haunting figure: a bust of Revathy, a railway track cleaner, one among many anonymous manual scavengers. Revathy’s impassive, dignified face stared straight ahead.

For a second, and perhaps only a second, my mind raced through the countless times I have travelled by train and conversations I have heard and participated in, where we alternately lamented or were pleasantly surprised by the dirtiness or cleanliness of the tracks and the stations. Momentarily, I joined the dots. Fleetingly, I was the child of Marx. And for an infinitesimally small unit of time, my body was one with the labour that sustains it.

The writer teaches anthropology at IIT-Madras, and believes that critical theory, melancholia and Hemant Kumar could save the world.

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