When put on the wall of a Miami art gallery by an artist named Maurizio Cattelan, celebrated for making golden toilets, it auctioned for $120,000 and became a worldwide sensation. For those who are looking for a new car, this sum, we are told, will buy you a 2021 model of a Chevy Trailblazer.
“I was hungry,” confessed David Datuna, a Georgian-born American performance artist. And he picked the banana from the wall and ate it for the cameras. He called the performance ‘Hungry Artist’. Man and banana merged. A myth suited for our digital age was born. All it will need is a digital artist to create reproductions of the banana and put it up on walls of art galleries around the world.
The ‘Hungry Artist’ may be seen as a symbol for the last decade. The digital age has triumphed. Reality and the virtual have become synonymous. Twined around each other, they have become indistinguishable. The body of the three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, who was found lying face down on the sandy beach along the Mediterranean littoral, became a heartbreaking symbol of the refugee crisis. It underlined our collective rage and helplessness, but it also became art. The moment was enshrined in an art installation at the Kochi Biennale the next year. Whatever his intentions, the artist did not call it ‘Drowned Humanity’.
Flashing images
Tragedy as spectacle has often served as a motif for art, particularly religious art. Just as during totalitarian regimes the brute power of the majority is signalled by mass parades of flag-waving people in perfect sync and heroic forms cast in bronze towering over the landscape. Earlier, the statues were bathed in milk and saffron, today strobe lights caress them with dazzling displays of subtly programmed messages produced by digital systems. The different body parts of a bronze hero are crafted and assembled with the expertise of a surgeon re-attaching a severed limb. In both cases, it will soon be possible for robots to replace the trained human component at the press of a button.
Power no longer comes from a gun but lies in the index finger of the digital artist. Without our even being aware of its power, the digital imprint has invaded every tiny crevice and cranny of our thinking lives, including memory. This is true whether we see it as the monetary transactions that we make at a bank or more automatically at an ATM or a gas station, or as digital art, as food, as the taste and colour with which we navigate our landscape listening to details about the weather conditions, or of the dangers lying ahead while lowering a stethoscope on the surface of the moon. It no longer matters for the most part how we describe ourselves as a society, whether democratic or totalitarian. Algorithms have already decided how we will vote our new leaders. We choose between two extremes. Flashing images of simple binaries, of real vs surreal; need vs greed; settler vs the outlier; hunger vs desire, are most often what constitutes freedom of choice.
Raise the flag
Needless to say, none of the double-edged desires that we now term binaries are new. They have been there forever. The question that we must ask ourselves is, how do we legislate these primal needs? There is, for instance, the question of whether we will be able to summon the desire to save our planet. Or whether in our anxiety to grab the resources that we venerated in the past — as the guardians of air, water, earth and space — will we fail to rein in our greed? Can we legislate hunger in a more creative way than through greed?
Rage is no longer an emotion, it’s an emoji, a thumbprint that can transmit anger in an instant across time and space. The last decade has empowered the collective manifestation of rage and its more intemperate twin, violence. In some cases, as with the Japanese filmmaker Takashi Miike, it can also be a philosophical stance. He has been quoted as saying about the overt violence that underlies his oeuvre, “Ultimately, violence is an expression of love”.
One of the strangest evolutionary features of the past decade has been the one legislating human desire. At its best it’s been a liberating force. For us in India, the scrapping of Section 377 of the IPC must be seen as one of the most dramatic changes that took place in the last decade. It allows people of alternate sexual orientations to live together as they choose. It has not just broken the shackles that have bound our society, it has also allowed every one of us to think and celebrate what must be seen as the diversity of being human.
As far as flags go, the rainbow flag is a celebration of inclusiveness that has released a spirit of creativity that breaches barriers and walls. It underlines the message the Dalai Lama recommends when life gets too complex.
“Let us laugh!”
The media critic and commentator decodes the baffling variety of human behaviour in our global village.
