When I declared in the social media while posting the
pictures of the curatorial projects realized (and unrealized) by my students in
Baroda that I would be writing about the experience in details a few well
meaning friends advised me against it; their fear was that the methodology
which they thought was successful in achieving the educational aims that I had
developed for this course would be copied or imitated elsewhere without any
acknowledgement. While I am thankful to those friends for warning me about the
possible perils of plagiarism of a methodology which has been very personal and
developed out of my personal experience as a curator for the last two decades,
I would like to reiterate the fact that however explicit I would be in this
series of essays, the projects and methodology would remain inimitable mainly
because the ones who would ‘imitate’ wouldn’t be the same students as I had in
Baroda. Each person who approaches a curatorial project with an open mind would
have different ideas about it depending on the intellectual as well as
spiritual circumstances that the educational institution provides. I should
also add that the success of a project depends on the enthusiasm and intellectual
ability of the students who in fact become the mediums as well as ‘curators of
such projects. Above all one should not overlook the fact that success of any
educational workshop or activity is directly proportionate to the
infrastructural support and friendly atmosphere that the institution provides
for the guide.
I would say, the Faculty of Fine Arts, MSU, Baroda had it
all and it lavishly showered all these things on me. A huge, visible and
burdensome lack in students’ fund was palpable yet I could see how the joyful
spirit of the young students overcame such impediments with so much grace and
dexterous manoeuvring. Dr. Poduval had already informed me of the lack of funds,
perhaps as a curator who had initiated projects with no funds in late 1990s it
was not a thing of worry for me. The University was paying for my teaching and
I had decided that in any circumstance I wouldn’t be forcing students to spend
from their pockets. As the projects were progressing and a general curiosity
around it was increasing from other faculty members and students, Dr.Poduval
told me that they were stroke players (the permanent teachers) and people like
me were Big Hitters. I couldn’t have agreed more. If the permanent teachers in
any educational institution are not preparing the students’ minds in a positive
way to receive new ideas and practices, they wouldn’t be accepting experimental
approaches. Baroda always had it. Even when the most conventional teaching
methods were practiced during my student period in Baroda, the ways in which
the teachers like Dr.Ratan Parimoo and Dr.Deepak Kannal prepared us were
comparatively exceptional considering the kind of limitations within which we
were taught. It has become a part of the Baroda lore that we all studied at
time, as a student critically put it to me, ‘yes sir, we accept that you all
studied Fauvism and its colours by looking at black and white reproductions of
Fauvist paintings.’ The manual archive in Baroda was a pre-Google phenomenon
and when I walked into the archive I could smell the fragrance of inertia and
see the modified boxes like educational coffins carrying the slow putrefying corpses
of reproduced masterpieces. But there is nothing to complain about from within
that morgue of research and erudition as the technology has rendered such old
and beautiful spaces perhaps obsolete and a thing of curiosity and nostalgia. I
am happy to learn that this archive is now in the process of being digitized.
Good for the future students.
Let me come back to the topic; the curatorial practice, a
module designed for giving a quick learning occasion for the art history and
aesthetic students to become curators in case if they want to become one.
Though we say that it is a highly competitive field in India, my experience as
an independent curator tells me that it is not so. Anybody who could put
together a few paintings and sculptures on the wall and floor of the galleries
call themselves curators. Anybody who ‘organizes’ an exhibition calls
him/herself a curator. A person who has been working as a journalist or a
public relation officer for cultural matters could one day come up as a
curator. A gallerist can definitely claim herself to be a curator. The ‘C’ word
has become so lucrative and fashionable that anybody puts things together calls
him/herself a curator. If so our mothers and fathers are the best curators that
we should learn from. The marriage broker, caterers, chefs, dancers, bands and
what not, anything that is thematically arranged could automatically raise the
arranger of it into the heightened position of a curator. At times, certain
programs are simply ‘curated’ even without a curator. So if you say that today
morning you had a curated morning walk I wouldn’t be surprised because curated
morning walks are already there!
To take rounded view of things, there is nothing wrong in
their claims. As the Steel Authority of India Limited advertises its claim that
‘there is a little bit of SAIL in your life’ (yes in some way a piece of iron
comes to our life even in the form of a key every day), there is a little bit
of curatorial practice in everything that is passed off as ‘curated’. But parts
do not make the whole. A curatorial practice is a process, which involves
intellectual ideation, infrastructural organisation, design based execution and
adequate outreach exercises. In this way a curator is more or less an artist.
S/he conceives, ideates, puts it on paper, looks for funds, finds artists,
locations, infrastructure, transportation, design, outreach and what not. It is
easier said than done. Looking at the easiness with which I explained the
components one would tend to say, big deal. True, it is not a big deal but it
all depends on how or who does it. One could buy a few steel vessels and weld
them together but it wouldn’t become a Subodh Gupta work or the person who does
it wouldn’t become another Gupta. Each person does it different; like a kiss.
What is there in a kiss, a peck, a mere lip lock or a full all over
French variety which would lift your leg up and force the eyes shut. But each
time it is different, done differently. So dear ones, even kisses are curated
by you!. But anything done subconsciously or biologically cannot be a curatorial
practice. Given a chance the rich and powerful would even have curated child
births.
There is another variety of curators in India. I would call
them the ‘stencil curators’. They go around all over the world and see a
variety of curatorial approaches in art fairs, biennales, Documenta and other
large scale art expos. Also they visit private galleries and museums where new
works are exhibited in highly sophisticated curatorial modes. Besides, they go
to see the other extremes also or read about them as in the case of
experimental curatorial practices that happen from the curator’s kitchen or
drawing room, artists’ studios, abandoned places and any possible space that
you could conceive of, and which are hailed as non-artistic spaces. Our
curators charged by these experiences come back and try to replicate such
experiences here. Anywhere in the world at any given time you would find such
fashion mongers in the cultural field who would like to be the replicas of
anything foreign and interestingly the young and impressionable minds are
everywhere in the art scene who would follow these curators. I don’t want to
say that there should be a home-grown organic curatorial practice for the
fundamentalist reasons. I wouldn’t even ask for a nationalistic curatorial
practice so that we could take our country’s pride all over the world. What I
am suggesting is that curatorial practices cannot be replicated for the sake of
its newer or strangers forms.
Like a work of art, curatorial practice also has form and
content. When we speak of language, words are not seen as building blocks of a
language nor as containers of fixed meanings nor even as containers where one
could fill in the meanings that s/he wants to fill in. On the contrary words
are taken as units capable of holding a particular meaning in the given space
and time and completely lose its sheen in another space and time. Similarly, a
work art that has a particular form cannot be having the same form all the time
even if the content remains the same. A form could be spoofed for a different
content but still it remains a spoof. To put it in other words, curatorial
practice is a creative one as what an artist does and it is not about
replicating or imitating any other universally accepted form. Hence, except for
the traditional museum curatorial practice, one cannot have a fixed school of
curatorial practice. The way teaching performance art is foolish and giving a
degree to it is a mammoth stupidity (though we could study and research on
performance art), curatorial practices cannot be ‘taught’. While a teacher
could unleash the curatorial potentials hidden in the minds of the students,
s/he also could teach the fundamental technicalities of curatorial practice
academically, exactly the way a master painter would teach his students how to
hold the brush and how to load paint in it and also how to make strokes and
create a form. Rest belongs to the student.
I do not want to go in detail about the methodology that I
adopted in preparing the students who came up with wonderful ideas. As teacher
my intention was to release them from the stereotypical thinking. From the
learners and practitioners position I wanted to make them imaginative and
creative. Art history students anywhere have the tendency to believe in the
written word than the visual facts. They often believe in the spaces defined by
the structures than the spaces lying outside. If you give a guide book of any
famous curator who has written extensively on curatorial practice (like Hans Ulrich Obrist), they would prod themselves to imitate something from the book. It is
easier to do because there is already a model made successful by a successful
curator. But let me tell you all the readers of this essay that none can
reproduce a curatorial project because a curatorial project is based purely on
the imagination of the curator, the location in which he finds himself, the
spaces are made available to him, the funds, the artists, the materials, the
permissions, the people’s behaviour, friends’ circles and so on. There are
innumerable visible and invisible factors that liberate or limit him or her.
But unfortunately we have young curators in our country who blatantly imitate
their foreign experiences here. It is exactly like a painter painting like
Damien Hirst or making an installation like Tracy Emin. Or in the worst case it
is like someone who went to Vangogh’s museum and came back to Delhi to do only
Post-Impressionist works.
I can tell very clearly and with a lot of love for all that
what I did was liberating the students from their own issues regarding their
ability to speak in English, their economy, their intelligence quotient, their
social and familiar background, whether they have dark complexion or fair
complexion, whether they were tall or short, whether they were friendly or
reticent and so on. I lectured them for two days and let them talk since then.
I was just a witness in their transformation from larvae to butterflies (yes
butterflies because the projects they did were beautiful but short lived
leaving the beautiful memories and fragrance all over the campus). As a keen
follower of the educational systems propounded by Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma
Gandhi and Jiddu Krishnamurthy, I let the students to work on their weakness
rather than strength. I asked them to talk, work and rework on the concepts,
abandon certain of their fixations and ideas ruthlessly, I asked them to
re-invent themselves, I asked them to confront the doubts in their minds, I
told them to speak in whichever language they wanted to speak and asked the
fellow students to translate it for me whenever I found difficult to understand
their languages or voices. When some student said she couldn’t do something, I
just asked her to drop it. I did not want any of my students to do an
‘assignment’. I wanted them to sing and dance through their ideas. They did.
Out of the twenty four students eighteen of them came up with projects and
realized. The four students however were not just witnesses or sulking imps in
the fairy land of curatorial practice. They like the seven dwarfs for eighteen
Snow Whites, stood shoulder to shoulder with the student curators and put in
their creative and physical energies to see the projects realized. On 21st
September 2017, Dr. Deepak Kannal inaugurated the projects in the presence of
Dr.Jayaram Poduval, Dr. Rita Soda, Gita Parmar, Indrapramit Roy and so on. In
his inaugural speech Dr.Kannal remembered that I was one among the first
students in the year that the Faculty had introduced curatorial practice as a
module. I was there in that batch. But as an art history student, I was not
allowed to do the curatorial practice. It was given only to the Art Criticism
students (then they were two disciplines). So I played the role of a supporter
and helper to my fellow students. Somehow, I did not want to reveal it in my
speech on the opening day. Now, welcome to the series.
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